Chapter 4. The Art of Sports

Divers in the 2008 Summer Olympics.

ISO 1600 f/2.8 1/1600 300mm

One thing that can really help make an exceptional sports photograph is research. And in the case of the Olympics, it includes looking at the work of other photographers.

It’s kind of an unspoken thing that we all do. We look at what everyone else is shooting, and we find the good angles because we don’t have time to find them ourselves sometimes.

So, over the weeks before shooting a sports event, you would examine the venue through others’ images and you would think, “Oh, that’s a great angle, let me try to find one when I get there.”

The idea is not to go and duplicate their image. If you do, you’re not really doing anyone any service. It’s kind of dishonest on your part, and you’re not contributing to the photography world.

I was scheduled to photograph volleyball on the last day of the Games, which included the final between China and the United States. I knew that there was one spot in the entire stadium that was dead center that had the Beijing logo. I’m not a big logo fan, but in this case I thought it would work. Trying to use words in photography is seldom very effective.

I got on the very first bus out to the venue and it was pouring rain, a real downpour. I just dashed to this location, and it is one of the times I brought only the equipment I needed. I had three lenses, including a 15mm fisheye in a small camera bag. I didn’t bring a laptop; I didn’t bring a long lens. I knew I wanted this image, and this image alone.

I also knew that if I had to drop off my stuff, someone could beat me to this one spot—the only spot in the stadium like this. I also knew that in the Olympics, once you leave your spot, you lose it. So I knew that once I sat there, I was going to live there for the next four to five hours.

It rained nonstop for the entire time. It just wouldn’t stop. And although initially I kept wiping the water off my camera and lenses, at one point I recognized that sometimes the greatest photographs happen by mistake, or when you accept the adverse conditions.

So I allowed water to accumulate on my 15mm fisheye lens. I set the aperture to f/16 and calculated the hyper focal distance to ensure that both the foreground and background were rendered acceptably sharp. So, I didn’t focus on the girls; I instead focused on this barrier itself, and used the depth of field to render the overall image sharp, especially the water droplets that were collecting on the front element of the lens. I patiently waited to use those droplets as part of my composition during the final.

Five minutes before the match, a Russian photographer walked up to me, looked at the water on my lens, picked up a wet sandy towel, and said, “Oh, no good, no good,” and started to wipe these perfectly accumulated water droplets off of my lens. We nearly had an international incident right then and there.

I let it go. I wiped it clean, and waited almost the entire match for the water to accumulate again in that way, then shot a few frames, getting the shot I’d waited all those hours to capture.

This image is all about layers. You’ve got a foreground, middle ground, and background layer, ideally. You know where you are: you’re in Beijing in 2008. You can see it’s a volleyball court. You can see the players. And what makes this image special is that the unexpected foreground element. How often do you see water droplets in a photograph? It’s pretty rare. But the droplets also convey that the entire match was played in the rain—it’s both factual and visual.

It’s an image that goes right back to marrying the aesthetic with the content.

USA’s Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor win the gold medal in the Women’s Beach Volleyball game against China. The game was played in the middle of a downpour, but not delayed.

ISO 640 f/22 1/50 15mm