Sports Photography, the Olympics, a Winner and a Challenge

DD is playing basketball in middle school and really enjoying it!  She's a wonderful defender and the third highest scorer on the team. I love sports photography and lately I've been thinking about why (maybe it's because of the Olympics).  I do two types of sports photography:  action shots and portraits. For the action shots, I really enjoy freezing that moment of athletic competition when two players are putting forth all their effort, trying their best, and one succeeds. There's always such emotion in these shots. In the photo at left, DD is off the ground and stealing the ball. Love it.


In the next photo of a player jumping on home plate after hitting a homerun, you can't see the pitcher he "defeated," but Sterling hit the ball off someone:

Other times, a great action shot can capture the moment when players don't know what the outcome will be, like this photograph where both the third baseman and runner are looking to the umpire to make a call on whether the runner is safe:

For the portraits, I love trying to capture the spirit of the athlete.  Here's one which I like (and I just noticed that the angle helps a lot):

One thing I'd like to do more of in my sports photography is capture negative, as well as positive emotion.  This famous photo of Olympic speedskater Dan Jansen (who fell in a race, shortly after learning of his sister's death) is a great example.  The photo is from Getty Images:

And how wonderful to be able to use sports photography to capture an important, historical moment, like this famous photo of black athletes giving a black power salute (again, not my photo):

Do you take sports photos?  Do you admire any in particular? Are there any enduring images from this year's Olympics that stick in your mind? NBC has a nice site with lots of photos here.


Speaking of competition, the winner of the Alice challenge is DEB!  I asked DS to choose a number between 1 and 11, and he chose 10.  Deb, send me your address, and I'll pop your houses in the mail.  Can't wait to see what you do with them!  And thanks to everyone who participated - there's a wealth of artistic inspiration in response to the challenge.  You can see them all at this post.  Thanks again!!!


And, speaking of challenges, I posted this week's challenge over at the Scrap Weekly Blog.  You can see it (and a couple of my poorly photographed layouts) here.