Honorable Mention - Sports Action

August 18, 2006

This photograph of mine won an Honorable Mention in the Sports Action category of the Utah News Photographers Association’s Photojournalism Competition. It shows US goalkeeper Kasey Keller making one of his six saves during a 3-0 victory over Costa Rica. Here’s the backstory:

The assignment was last June, when the U.S. soccer team faced Costa Rica in a World Cup qualifying match. It was a huge game, the biggest soccer game in Utah history and the biggest international sporting event here since the 2002 Winter Olympics. So the pressure was on to produce great photography. In a game like this you can’t afford to miss a moment. Anything can happen and you have to be in place and ready to catch it.

We had two photographers assigned to the game, Danny La and myself. There was no sideline access so once you picked a side, you pretty much had to stay put. Danny worked one end of the field and I worked the other. If something happened on my end, it was my responsibility.

Shooting soccer presents a lot of challenges. The action moves all over a large field. The right lens to bring is a 400mm, which gives you a sweet shot near the goal, but it doesn’t quite reach out to action further away. The problem is, a lot of the action is away from the goal. You need a much longer lens to reach out to that action, but it’s not really practical to have a 600mm in one hand and a 400mm in the other. These are huge, heavy lenses! But as one top European soccer photographer told me during the Olympics when I asked him about soccer: “The goals are all that matter.”

So Danny and I each staked out a goal and waited for the action to come to us. During the game you do track the action that’s too far out, but most of those shots require more cropping that I’d prefer to do.

From what I remember, Costa Rica was sprinting to the goal. At that point I had two choices: stay with the player attacking or put the lens on the goalkeeper. There’s no way I could have photographed both, and if they collided it wouldn’t matter who I started with. So I went to the keeper and let the camera do the rest.

This sequence shows the frames I shot of this particular save. You can see the second of the five frames was the award-winner. It happened so quick, like snapping your fingers. The camera fires 8.5 frames per second, so that ball was moving like a bullet.

You don’t see it much on the screen or in the paper, but the focus is tack sharp on the ball and the keeper’s face is a little behind the focus. It happened so quick I’m surprised the camera kept up with the ball so well and then stayed on the keeper once the ball left the frame.

After the game I was editing in the press box, surrounded by other photographers also pounding away on their laptops. While we’re all competitive, when someone gets a photo like this everyone comes over to look at the screen and offer compliments. The real satisfaction, though, came the next morning when I opened the paper to the sports page and saw the photo very large as the dominant image on the sports page.

Several things that make a great sports action photo are in this photograph: relatively clean background, peak moment, great facial expression. But most importantly the photo tells part of the story of the game. Keller had a great game with six saves.

I’ll write more about Real Madrid and David Beckham’s visit to Salt Lake City last weekend. That was another great game, and it’s worth an entry.

This post also appeared on my work blog on The Salt Lake Tribune’s website. As always, thanks to my marvelous “word editor” Peg.

Posted by trent | Filed Under On Assignment, Photographs, Trent 

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