Sportog Photographers

If you are a photographer and currently shooting high school sports in your area - we want to hear from you!

Simply email us at dave@sportog.com with three high school sports photos for review. Your application will be reviewed quickly and you will be contacted via email regarding your Sportog affiliation. If accepted, we will email you a welcome packet that contains all the additional information you need to get started. It is that simple!

Join the Sportog team and share your work with the local community. If you are like most photographers you really enjoy capturing the moment and preserving "once in a lifetime moments". Many athletes regret later in life that they did not preserve these memories. Sportog provides a simple efficient way for them to preserve these lifetime mementos by purchasing action photos and digital images.

Many of you post on Picasa, have a local website or you just give a CD to the Booster Club. All of these methods work in a limited fashion but it is difficult to get the word out (how many times have you heard from a parent that they did not even know you were posting photos?). There is not an easy way to provide fundraising for your school. Sportog gives back to the school in exchange for the publicity and web links they provide. Sportog also provides digital files of all images for the school to use as promotional material and yearbook.

All Sportog partners benefit, the photographer gets maximum exposure (and financial compensation), the parents have a way to capture these memories and the school derives revenue from site sales.

Sportog was developed to provide the advanced amateur a way to showcase their work and "give back" to the school and the local community. Sportog Photographers do not have to be "exclusive" to Sportog, posting and offering prints for sales at other sites, we certainly hope that you will choose to use Sportog as your only online posting site but that is something you can decide.

Why should you join Sportog?

1. Sportog provides a clean, safe, user-friendly location to let everyone see your photos.
2. Share photo sales revenue with your school of choice.
3. Enable the user community to rate your photos.
4. "Send to a Friend" email feature further increases the community exposure to your photos.
5. Each registered user can collect their favorite photos and share their albums on line, you can quickly see which photos that people like and enhance your shot selection.
6. Spend your time shooting and capturing events, not supporting and maintaining a website
7. Earn extra income to enable you to uprade your photo equipment - if you do not want to receive your portion of the photo sales you can donate that back to your sponsoring school.
8. Establish a small business - work with your tax professional to determine how you can depreciate your equipment costs and write off photo expenses.
9. Increase your photo skills, feedback from the user community and networking with other professionals provides valuable tips and suggestions.
10. You will reach a large audience due to aggregation and automated user notification of new events and photos.
11. Sportog member schools control field access and will provide the proper credentials.

You must abide by local and state laws as well as all school or athletic department requests regarding access to fields and courts while photographing a high school sporting event

Commission Schedule

Sportog will compensate the contributing photographer based upon their sales, commissions are determined with a "base rate" combined with an annual "bonus" based upon TOTAL annual sales. The bonus is retroactive over the sales year and will be awarded annually at the end of our fiscal year.

The commission Schedule is as follows:


Commissions will accumulate until you reach a minimum of $100.00, funds can be requested at any time after that but the minimum payout must be $100.00 for each withdrawal request.

Shooting Tips

Sportog asks that you abide by local and state laws as well as all school or athletic department requests regarding access to fields and courts while photographing a high school sporting event.

Shoot in Aperture Priority, choose the Depth Of Field (DOF) you are looking for and then adjust the ISO range to achieve the shutter speed that will stop the action. Any shutter less than 1/400^th will result in motion blur, some of this is acceptable and adds to the image (hand, ball, etc) but if the subject is blurry then the shot is not attractive

Keep shooting after the action event to capture the emotions and congratulations. Some of the best shots show the elation in a player after they have scored or made a great play.

Do not hesitate to shoot close in to the player, parents love to see the faces.

1. Use a long zoom lens with a wide open aperture - It keeps the subjects sharp and lets the background go soft.
2. Take a knee. Your subject will appear larger and since you are shooting "up" you will have a nice uncluttered background.
3. Try to shoot with the sun at your back, daytime sports are difficult due to harsh shadows
4. Take a "portrait", capture the expression and intensity of the moment, crop in tight.
5. Take pictures of the athlete before the play begins as they are concentrating on the upcoming event.
6. Continue shooting after the main "action" to catch the emotion afterwards.

Sporting events are unlike any other pursuits or activity in that they bond people together, whether the local High School, Little League or major competitions. Sports can draw out the best and worst in everyone. The range of action and emotions and drama on display at these events is unmatched by any other activities. The games are an important part of our communities.

The Sports Photographer is in a unique position to document these unforgettable moments in time. Many of us remember images that capture the moment and preserve this small slice of time. Sports photographers are at the same time artists, historians and story tellers, using their skills and equipment to allow others to experience the emotions and thrills of victory and the agony of defeat. There is much more to being a great sports photographer than just showing up and clicking the shutter. Don't be discouraged by trying to make the picture that you can visualize in your mind's eye. Keep shooting and learn from each outing.

Being able to take consistently good photographs - sports or any other kind - takes a lot of practice. Successful action photography takes both preparation and a degree of luck. The ability to anticipate the action only comes with knowledge and practice, knowing the players and having experience with the team helps you to anticipate the next shot. Luck always favors the well prepared photographer, the best way to improve is to practice your craft.

One of the most important parts of Sports Photography is to understand the sport. The better you understand the details of the sport the more likely you will be "lucky" enough to anticipate the action. For many "one sport" shooters this is very easy since they are passionate about that particular sport and understand all the nuances. Research the sport and study photos that capture the essence of the game and look for these subjects, angles, timing, and position.

Your chances of success are enhanced when you are able to anticipate the action and position yourself in the best spot. Knowing the rules and nuances increase the likelihood that you will be ready when the moment arrives. Each sport has critical moments when a key play must happen, knowing the athletes options will enable you to prepare for the shot.

One of the goals of Sportog is to cover events that are not normally captured, learn the details of another sport and preserve the memories for another group of athletes. Every sport provides memories and great opportunities to "Capture the Moment".

Focus on all the players, the "Team Hero" always gets great coverage and there will be plenty of pictures of these players on the site. Some of the most dramatic photos sometimes occur "away from the action". Catching different reactions of players (winning and losing) helps to "tell the story" of a sporting event. Concentrate on additional shooting "after the play" and record these "once in a lifetime" emotions.

Alternate between horizontal and vertical framing of your photos. Purchase an optional battery pack with a "vertical" grip and shutter release so you can comfortably shoot in "Portrait" mode. It is always tempting to catch "the whole play" and these photos are always important but the shots that the parents and players like are the ones that capture the faces. Do not hesitate to crop in tight and shoot these facial expressions.

Plan ahead, check out the lighting situation, it is always best for outdoor events to shoot with the sun at your back but sometimes you have to experiment with different situations. Go with an open mind but have a plan and shoot to your plan. You can always change your mind and adapt to the elements but it is far better to start with a plan and then only change if required.

Finally, just go out and shoot. You will not always capture the winning goal or the game winning catch but there is no substitute for shooting and practicing your craft, have a great time and capture these fantastic moments in time.

Sportog Code of Quality

1. All photos must be in clear focus
2. Adjust photos for correct exposure as required
3. Run auto-color and auto contrast prior to posting as required
4. Review images and determine if you captured what you intended, do not post pictures if you cannot clearly determine the action you were trying to capture.
5. Be selective in what you post. Example: if you shoot a burst sequence and the first three shots are duplicates then delete two of them.
6. Photos that you select for posting represent you and your skills, always strive to both capture the event and maintain excellence.
7. Sportog reserves the right to delete any images based on quality or content.
8. Use "Best Practices" with respect to exposure, clarity and content. Post process your images prior to uploading as required.

Sports Shooting Tips from Nill Toulme (used with permission) http://www.toulme.net/

Here are some basics for shooting sports. I wrote this for soccer, but it applies more or less to any action sport:

1. Shoot tight.

2. Crop tighter.

3. Subject to occasional intentional rule-breaking exceptions, what you're shooting for is face/ball/action/contact. No particular order, and the more the better, but with *very* few exceptions, a shot without a face and the ball goes in the trash (assuming, of course, that the sport employs a ball...). Expressions matter a lot.

CAVEAT on the ball "rule:" I've been shooting a fair amount of lacrosse lately and realized that this guideline doesn't apply to sports like LAX and American football where some players are likely to go the entire game without touching the ball - or in the case of football linesmen, for example, even getting anywhere near it. For sports and players like these, you can more or less forget the ball and just go for face/action/contact. (I'm not sure how this applies to baseball, where mostly nothing happens at all. I guess there you're just going for face.)

4. Watch your backgrounds, both while shooting and in editing. Shooting big apertures wide open will help to blow out distracting backgrounds to a pleasing blur. (And I've been known to move garbage cans - physically, not digitally - to get them out my backgrounds.)

5. Unless you're going for the (very) occasional intentional effect, keep your horizon level. Fix it in the crop if necessary.

6. Don't be afraid to cut off body parts, but don't cut them off at the joint. I.e., don't cut off a leg at the ankle or the knee, and don't cut off an arm at the elbow or the wrist. It's something subliminal about the way the brain processes the image that makes a shot cropped that way vaguely disturbing and off-putting.

7. For the little guys, get down low and shoot from their level. Some people use knee pads (available cheap from Home Depot) for this purpose. My knees aren't so good, so I use a wonderful little folding three-legged camp stool that swivels.

8. Pay some attention to the overall "design" of your image - the way the various visual elements interact. This isn't high art we're engaged in here, but a little art goes a long way to make a better image. (E.g., remember the "rule of thirds," and think about diagonals in your image...)

9. Shooting RAW will leave you more latitude to recover from exposure and WB excursions, and often gives you better ability to handle high contrast situations like bright overhead sun and white uniforms without blowing the highlights, or to recover from unintentional (or intentional, see settings discussion below) underexposure. (A good RAW workflow can be just as fast and efficient as jpg, but that's another topic entirely.)

10. Flash sucks (but sometimes there's no choice, like shooting American football in dark high school endzones...)

11. If you can, use a monopod.

12. Don't be afraid to trade ISO for shutter speed. A sharp noisy image is better than a clean blurry one.

13. Shoot a lot. Then shoot some more.

14. Only show the good ones.

15. What you consider a good one will change over time.

16. Shoot tight.

Camera settings (some but not all Canon-specific):

For outdoor sports I shoot in Av (Canon-speak for aperture-priority), evaluative, lens wide open, i.e. typically f/2.8 outdoors and f/2 inside. I always shoot wide open not only for the additional shutter speed it affords but moreso because I like an out of focus background that isolates the subject better. (But note that if you have the light, stopping down a bit can give you a little more depth of field for multiple player shots and, especially using converters or cheaper lenses, improve sharpness somewhat. And if your background is far enough away from your subject, it can still be adequately out of focus that way.)

I shoot at the lowest ISO that will give me plenty of shutter speed, and the more shutter speed the better. This not only helps to stop action but also makes up somewhat for my sloppy camera handling skills.

In broad daylight that might translate to starting out at something like ISO 200, 1/3200 at f/2.8. As the light falls I'll start easing up the ISO to keep the shutter speed at least up around 1/2500 or so until maybe I hit ISO 800. Then I'll let the shutter speed float on down till it gets to maybe 1/1000 or 1/1500 or so, then to keep it there I'll start ratcheting up the ISO again in steps till it hits 1600. Then I'll let the shutter speed continue to float down till I'm at 1/400. And *then* I'll switch to manual mode, 1/400 @ f/2.8, because I've found that for me, 1/400 is the absolute minimum to get reasonable stopped action. 1/320 or less and it really starts to fall apart.

At that point, depending on the stadium lighting I'll either stay at 1/400, f/2.8, ISO 1600 or if it's really dark (and it often is), with the 1D Mark II or Mark II N I'll go all the way to ISO 3200. I wouldn't do that with the original 1D, but with the Mark II's and other later Canon bodies, ISO 3200 is really very usable, especially if you crank up the black point in the RAW conversion (and I should add that I shoot RAW exclusively and process with C1) to block up the shadows and mask the noise. And I'll underexpose and push the conversion rather than going below 1/400. Again - a sharp noisy shot is better than a blurry cleaner one.

This all probably sounds complicated but it's not. Really all you do is keep an eye on your shutter speed and crank up the ISO as necessary to keep it where you want it. IOW, exposure becomes a dynamic combination not just of shutter speed and aperture, but of those two things and ISO. This is one of the many great things about digital as opposed to shooting film. In fact, for me it's really just shutter speed and ISO, since it's so rare for me to shoot at anything other than max aperture.

For indoor sports go manual. In the cavelike HS gyms where I shoot, that usually means ISO 3200, 1/400 at f/2. Here again, I will underexpose rather than go below 1/400.

As for focus, try center point only (I've experimented with CF17-1 and -2 on the 1-series bodies and have gone back to CF17-0, and I find auto focus point selection useful only for birds in flight), AI servo of course, and CF4-3 to activate AF with the * button. That takes a little getting used to, but once you do it makes it a lot easier to lead the AF before hitting the shutter, and to keep tracking the subject with AF on while hitting the shutter periodically. It also allows you to effectively use AI servo as one-shot to lock focus and recompose, just by focusing with * and then releasing it to lock focus, e.g., for reaction shots of the bench. (CF4-3 gives you a new AE reading for each frame in a burst. This is useful when you're tracking players in and out of sun and shadow. CF4-1 locks AE at the half shutter press, so every frame in a burst gets the same exposure. Some people prefer that; I don't.)

IMPORTANT: Note that on all Canon DSLR's, in AI servo the first frame in a burst is release-priority, i.e., the shutter will fire even if focus is not acquired. Subsequent frames in the burst are focus-priority. The result is you will not infrequently find that the first frame in a sequence is OOF, and subsequent frames sharp. The best cure for this is leading the AF and giving it a chance to catch up to the subject before you fire the shutter, and also always firing at least two or three frames, as you have a better chance of the later ones being in focus. [CAVEAT: The 1D Mark III has additional options in this regard. Not having a Mark III, I'm not in a position to comment on them. Note also that the CF numbers and combinations have changed in the Mark III and 40D, so you'll have to do a little translating on that with respect to some of the other advice in this post.]

Some clarification on what I mean when I say "Shoot (and crop) tight." This obviously doesn't always mean cutting off arms and legs and ears. Context can be important to tell the shot's story. What is does mean is to try to leave out everything that's not important to that story and especially to eliminate anything that distracts from it.

One last thought by way of encouragement - shooting sports is hard, and it stays hard. I've shot almost a million frames of sports over the last few years, and I've learned some things, and I'm getting better at it, but I still have a long way to go. That's part of what makes it so much fun, just like fly-fishing. There's always something new to learn, and you can always get better, but you can still really enjoy yourself along the way, and if you do it a lot you'll inevitably stumble onto some very satisfying results.

As far as keeper ratio is concerned, don't let it get you down, and rejoice in the fact that you're shooting digital so your marginal cost is zero. I thought I had done pretty well when I got my keeper ratio up to a fairly constant 20% or so. After a while it went down, though, to a pretty consistent 10% - mostly because I got pickier about what I consider a keeper. More recently still it's started creeping back up, because I've begun to adopt a slightly more deliberate shooting style that tends to bring me home with about half the number of frames I used to shoot at a given event - but I bet it's still not as high as 20%.

Starting a Photography Business

Once you are publishing your photos on Sportog and start receiving income it is time to consider whether or not you want to form a small business.

You must consult with your tax professional to determine how this applies to your particular situation and determine the current local and national regulations.

Some of the general thoughts and considerations are listed below (some are applicable to all small businesses and some are unique to the photo business), again check with your tax professional to determine the exact rules and updated regulations.

1. You can have some "loss" years but eventually you will have to produce a profit or the IRS will consider this a hobby and not a business.
2. Your major purchases can be deducted on a multi-year depreciation schedule.
3. Your travel expenses to and from sporting events are deductable.
4. You should secure a resale license for sales tax purposes and a business license in your local area, both of these are necessary to create this small business.
5. Everyday expenses like postage, promotional materials, business cards, etc are deductable as business expenses.

There is an outstanding discussion on starting a photography business written by Dan Heller, this discussion can be found at:

http://www.danheller.com/photo-inc.html#3

To the athletes we say: "take your best shot, we will take ours"