Conflict: The Essence of Sports Photography

The Allen Lady Mustangs and the Stonewall Lady Longhorns tangle in a game last week in Stonewall. As you can see, the competition can get pretty physical.
The Allen Lady Mustangs and the Stonewall Lady Longhorns tangle in a game last week in Stonewall. As you can see, the competition can get pretty physical.

One of the core goals of sports photography is to capture the moment of conflict, which, by its very nature, is at the heart of athletic competition.

Presently, we are in the heart of the basketball season; finishing the regular season and moving into playoffs.

Capturing the moment of conflict can be elusive. Often inexperienced photographers will shoot dozens or hundreds of frames in a row trying to capture it, the so-called “spray and pray” method, but that usually results in a mess of inconsistent frames and an editing nightmare afterwards.

A better approach is to learn about the sport you are covering, and learn to anticipate when and where the action will happen. With basketball, there are a lot of places to be, but I have a lot of success watching players drive toward the basket, where the other team will try to stop them.

Games without conflict are boring. In this image, the Latta Lady Panthers and the Atoka Lady Wampus Cats tangle.
Games without conflict are boring. In this image, the Latta Lady Panthers and the Atoka Lady Wampus Cats tangle.

There are a lot of camera and lens options for photographing basketball, but in the last couple of years, I’ve been going to my AF-S Nikkor 85mm f/1.8G. It’s not as versatile as a big zoom, but it’s lightweight, super sharp, and fast to focus. As I get older, the biggest selling point is its weight.

An unwritten rule in photojournalism for my entire career is that we like to have the ball in the photo somewhere. I’ve relaxed that rule somewhat in my photography, somewhat because we can use so many more photos in our newspaper than we could years ago.

I’m also all about faces and expressions, which tell the story better than anything.

Photographing sports is a lot of fun. It gets more fun when we start to get better results.

The Ada Cougars took on Durant recently. You can anticipate the moment of conflict in this image from the player’s body language and facial expressions.
The Ada Cougars took on Durant recently. You can anticipate the moment of conflict in this image from the player’s body language and facial expressions.