Thomas Boyd

So after class, i immediately decided to dive into some research. I always surround myself with sports, watching baseball, golf, whatever sport I can find, but the one thing I realized: I don't know anything about the influential sports photographers of our time. One photographer that I came across was Thomas Boyd, whose photographs I could really relate to, what type of photographer I wanted to become. One characteristic that I noticed throughout his images were that his timing is impeccable, every moment was captured to the exact second where the subject expressed emotion. Because of his website design, you cannot save images, or post URLs, but the website is here.

One photo I particularly enjoyed off the site was a woman competing in the high jump. The composition is nice, low aperture helped blur out the background, leaving a nice crisp foreground, allowing no confusion to the emphasis of the image. The bar is to separate the image, but tilted ever so slightly to create a diagonal rather than framing it level across the image. Making these conscious, artistic decisions gives the image more originality. I always find myself using rules such as rule of 3rds and using diagonals rather straight lines dividing the image, they've always seemed to ordinary and bland for my taste.

The expression on the woman's face is incredible, the look of giving everything you've got to assure you come out on top. Emotions are always present in sports, whenever you're pushing your body to the max. I find "game faces" to be an important part of sports photography, everyone has a different one, and capturing them does take skill and great timing.

I feel that sports photography a genre that packs so many factors into one. So many things impact the outcome of your images: patience (for that one image that's going to wow), attention to detail (focus and following the action), skill and knowledge (in order to get the best photos, you need to know the sports you're photographing, so you can predict the next move). For me, the art that is sports photograph is exciting, it allows me to feed my passions for sports by experiencing them first-hand, but also being able to share them with images collected throughout those 4 quarters (or 3 periods, etc.) I want to be able to capture those timeless images that have surrounded sports since its introduction. In my opinion, sports are the most pure and raw form of reality (instead of crappy shows like Real World).

There will be more posted, just wanted to write down a few ideas for the time being, while they were still fresh in my head.