Well, why not? If you're watching figure skating, and there's a camera at hand, it's a no-brainer. So that's what I did. I set my camera for manual focus and purposely threw the image a bit out of focus. Set the camera for black and white. And, sitting back in the comfort of my chair, focused on the television screen and waited.
There's a LOT of waiting involved because you're at the mercy of the TV camera crew and how they are framing the shot. You're waiting for the skater to do something that makes a strong silhouette. And you're waiting for the skater to be in front of a clean and simple background. Since the backgrounds usually contain huge ads, with words that say SMUCKER'S or AT&T, you wait for the overhead shot looking down-ice, or when the skater zooms past the scorer's table.
There are a lot of wasted pixels, too. The skater goes into a spin, you take your photo, you realize his head is completely missing, or his upraised arm blends into the dark background crowd (except for the one nimrod wearing a BRIGHT WHITE jacket), or the skater's leg is going off at a bizarre angle.
But every once in awhile something good happens and the skater looks clean and dramatic against a plain and simple background. In these five photos, I had to do a fair amount of cropping to get rid of extraneous elements (such as the NBC logo!). I also added texture (a photo of the sun and clouds reflected on wet sand) to the images to create a spotlight effect (if the skater is in a competition, all the lights are on, not the moody spotlighting you see in a televised ice show).
Here are some of the better shots I've taken lately. I'm not a REAL people photographer, I just play one on TV . . .
©Carol Leigh, practicing armchair sports photography
