As confirmations for covering the photography for this season’s road running & trail races start coming in it’s apparent I’ll be needing a few additional photographers to shoot events with me. What’s it take to shoot races?
- You have to be willing to get up early on a weekend; often races start at 8:00am! Photos are best taken with a fast medium telephoto lens.
- Canon’s 70-200 f/2.8 does a super job of isolating the runner from the rest of the pack behind. The longer focal length coupled with a open aperture distinctively blurs the background and helps the subject runner ‘pop’ off the page.
- You’ve got be committed and reliable. If the race director is expecting you to take photos you have to show for duty.
- You have to have a site to display the post race images for racers to view and purchase prints and digital downloads online. Make sure your photos are searchable by bib number and last name. If a racer has to browse through a few thousand photos to find a few of them they’ll likely leave your site long before they find their images.
Covering races is purely speculative. Photographer’s typically don’t make any money in advance for shooting, and rely on post race sales. Hopefully the race director will offer a link directly to the photo gallery site off their results page encouraging racers to view the photos of themselves. If it’s a great photo the likelihood they’ll buy a print or digital download is good and the photographer will make some money.
Last night I met up with another photographer, Alan Nielsen of Nine Live Photography based in Burlington. Check out Alan’s 365 day blog posts. A new photo every day, which is more difficult than you think! Hopefully Alan will be available to shoot some races this season. A new challenge for Alan which I’m sure he’ll enjoy.
