Don't Neglect Coaches

When shooting youth sports the athletes are obviously the stars of the show. As photographers we try to get photos of the players that will sell to the parents. But coaches are also interesting subjects that we should not ignore.

Coaches have different personalities. Some are quite reserved. Some are very animated. It is those that are animated that make the best photographs, in my opinion. But having a good shot of a coach deep in thought is also nice as it provides insight to that coach's personality as well as the tension in the game.

   

Sports are team efforts and the coaches are an important part of the team. Whether its sending a play in from the sidelines or arguing with an official, the actions of the coaches, captured by the camera, helps tell the entire story of a game, including the emotion of a close contest.

Most sports have multiple coaches and I try to get shots of each coach during the season. In football, for example, there are coaches who work with a select group of players on a certain skill. There are coaches for quarterbacks, receivers, kickers, etc. I try my best to get shots of players with their respective skill coaches as well as isolation shots of the coaches, both during a game and during pre-game.

Photography is all about memories. Capturing the interaction of a coach and player today will provide future memories. I have one football mom who has asked me to get shots of her son with his coach. This mom realizes that coaches are an important part of an athlete's development and success. She realizes that years from now having a photo of yourself with your coach will bring back memories. 

One good time to get shots of coaches with players is after a game. Often times they will huddle with the team at the end of the game. Whether they've won or lost, they are often most animated at this time. I do try to be sensitive to the team and if they have just lost an important game I won't encroach too closely. Likewise, as I am usually shooting for one team, I don't get to close to the other team during pre-game or half-time huddles for fear of being accused of stealing strategic information (it has happened to me once before). 

Sports are a team effort and coaches are a very important part of the team that should not be neglected. They are very interesting subjects to photograph. 

KSean Sports Photography

Tagging Photos Provides Benefits

When I started my sports photography business back in 2011 I knew I needed to have an e-commerce website where parents could buy pictures of their kids. Parents are busy people, especially parents of student athletes. These parents are driving their kids to practice at least a couple of times a week, probably do some volunteer work for their kids team, and attend the games and sometimes practices too. Not to mention they are most likely employed and may have other kids who need their attention as well. If the parent is a single parent, then the burden of all this responsibility falls on them.

I knew that my website had to be easy to use. Just posting several dozen photos of a football game, for example, and requiring the visitors to my site to page through all the photos to find their kids was unacceptable. My site needed to provide an easy way for parents to easily and quickly locate all the photos of their athlete. This would be of benefit to them, of course, but would also benefit me, as parents would be more likely to visit my site and therefore, hopefully, buy more photos.

In order to achieve this goal I tag all photos with the names of all the players in the photo. This takes a lot of time but in my opinion it’s worth it. Early in the season it can be a slow process, as I don’t know the players very well. I need to learn the players by jersey number, especially for sports like football and lacrosse where masks cover their faces. As the season goes on I get to the point where I have all the jersey numbers memorized and can quickly add the player’s name to a photo.

Each of the four players in this photo should be identified by keywords.

I do all this work in Lightroom, adding the names as keywords. I enter both the first and last name within double quotes, creating a single keyword made up of two words. I then upload all the photos to my website. Further, each athlete has his/her own gallery on my site, which contains only his or her pictures. This gallery can be bookmarked so parents can easily return to it. These galleries also have an RSS feed to which parents can subscribe. This allows them to get notified by email when new photos of their child are added. This approach saves visitors to my site lots of time.

Besides saving parents lots of time on my site, tagging all photos with player’s names provides another benefit. It allows out-of-town parents to find photos of their athlete that they normally wouldn’t find. I advertise my work locally by handing out business cards to fans at games I attend. But there are plenty of parents and other relatives who live out of town and don’t know anything about me. These include parents of college athletes who are playing away from home, divorced parents of local athletes who may not live in my area, and grandparents and other members of the athlete's extended family. I have had a few sales to these out-of-town customers who found my photos simply by doing a web search on their kid’s name. If I hadn’t taken the time to tag all the photos these parents would never have found my photos and I would have missed out on a sale.

In order to tag the photos with the player’s name you need to know who the players are. The best way to do this is to obtain a team roster. These are usually available online on the team’s website. But I often find that these rosters are inaccurate. They are usually made once before the season starts and are not updated as the season progresses. But players often leave or join the team or change jersey numbers during the season. Some players even wear different numbers for their home and away uniforms. So I find the best thing to do is try to obtain a roster at the game. Often there is a team manager (usually a student) or coach who can provide this. If the team is playing in a stadium with a PA announcer calling the game, he usually has an accurate roster that he uses to call out the player’s names. I try to get this roster after the game. Although I try not to interact too much with player’s on the sidelines during a game, sometimes I will ask one of them to help me identify another team member.

Photography is a retail business; it is also a service business. The more service I can provide to my customers the more likely they will purchase from me and the more likely they will return to my site in the future. Tagging photos with the player’s names is definitely a time consuming task. But it provides benefits to both me and my customers. 

KSean Sports Photography

Welcome to My New Blog!

Look for my blog starting in a couple of weeks. I'll be blogging on the business and techniques of sports photography. I hope you will join me! In the meantime, please check out my photos on my website.