Professional Insights

In a way, I view my job as a sport, as a competition: whoever gets the best image wins. My job is to provide the best image for my publication. The baseball player in the game I might be covering is trying to win the game, and I am too: the game of getting a great picture for Sports Illustrated. I have to create something that is better than what another photographer at the game creates. I need to make an image that tells a story in such a way that it stands out from the rest of the images captured by other photographers there. That is my "victory."

Being a photographer is very similar to being an athlete in one way: we are driven to succeed. Good photographers are every bit as driven as, for example, a Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky. They want to win in their sport and have that extra drive in addition to athletic ability that helps them prevail where others might falter. In my case it is the will to produce a better image: one of my editors will approve of and our audience/readers will enjoy. That's how I and everyone on our staff got to where we are: again, we are driven to succeed, to create the winning image. The editors and Sports Illustrated expect us to get that image, and our readers expect to see that image in our magazine and on the website.

In the past, there might have been 10-20 photographers at a football game. Now there might be 40-50 - maybe up to 70 at the largest events. They all have the opportunity to make good images; superior autofocus and auto exposure systems have made the required skill set much less severe. So what's going to make my picture better than the others? That's what I have to think about. I might not be the best photographer on that field on any given day but you'd be hard pressed to find one that works harder. It takes the experience of years shooting sports combined with the equipment I use, mixed with a bit of luck, to come out with creative and interesting images week after week, game after game.

Sometimes I feel like a 45-year-old knuckle-baller in major league baseball: I've been in the game for a long time, and have experience that I put to work for me - I know what works, and what doesn't work. I can use those things to make my job easier, perhaps spending less time on technical aspects and more time on creative ones.

I'm used to huge sports venues. I've been to more arenas and stadiums than I'd like to count. They are all very similar. For the most part, my shooting and working locations don't change much, so I have to concentrate on how I make each picture a little bit better than the last one I made. Sometimes that edge is very, very small. It may not be noticeable to you, but I'm conscious of it, and I work hard to make that slight difference every time.

Technology in photography will always be improving, but the most obvious and significant advancement in the last ten years has been autofocus systems. The development and use of autofocus has helped all photographers, myself included - it is so much easier to shoot in autofocus modes. Autofocus speeds are incredible and the capture of subjects is unbelievable. The percentage of sharp images has risen exponentially through the years.

In the morning, we went up the hill and ran the skiers through the gates. I shot while they soared, carved and raced by. I thought, "I'm not really catching them." They were just moving too fast from positions that were hidden; I had no time to lock on to them. We shot a couple of runs then put some of the images on the computer to check them out. That's when I realized that this camera was nailing it - it was catching the skier flying off of that hill and the shots were tack-sharp. I started thinking about just how small a window of time that really was. The camera had only a millisecond to catch that person coming out of nowhere, lock on and make it tack-sharp.