Advice for Rubgy photography

[DinoS]

Hi,

I'm doing a shoot for a local junior rugby club, and these photos will be placed in a calender.

I am taking the photos for free but will sell them to the parents.

First of all does anyone has any advice on taking rugby pictures, im using a sigma 70-200mm.

Secondly how would you say is best to maximise profit from the photos?

I was thinking all the photos on a CD for £8, considering there are 40-50 kids this could make a nice sum,

Thanks

 

[dunganick]

The only catch with your proposed idea is parents tend to be organised creatures. They will buy 1 disc and it will do the rounds of each social group.

However besides prints or emailing individual images i cant think of a better way to do it.

For rugby ive not got the hang of it yet, but i find using the lowest aperture possible produces a better image as the background is better separated from the subject.

Plus all the usual, light on the right side of the players, faces, fronts of them, try not to cut limbs off.

All of the above is easy to say, but i have found very hard to put into practice. Rugby can be fast moving and tends to have lots of people moving around in the foreground and background ruining your clean shots.

 

[Tobers]

I suggest you go to Getty Images website and search for a photographer called David Rogers. He's their top rugby photographer and it will give you a good idea of what rugby photography is all about. Bit different to the junior stuff you'll be doing, but parents will have seen David Rogers style pics in the papers and that's what they'll want.

With a 70-200 you're going to struggle to get close to the action, so wait until it comes close to you. Ideally you'd be on 300mm, and 400mm is the length of choice for most rugby photographers. Shoot from the ends to get those nice head-on shots. Shoot from the sides to get scrum and lineout action. Keep your lens at the widest aperture and adjust the ISO to keep the shutter above 1/640th to freeze the action.

Select your position to give you the cleanest possible background (no cars, portable toilets etc in the background please). Shoot from low down - as low as you can get - pics look much better that way.

Have a look-see on the Sport section of this forum where myself plus a few other rugby togs often post stuff. I've got more rugby shots at www.tobinators.com/sports as well if you want a look, including some school rugby as well as premiership & international stuff.

 

[KIPAX]

Tobers is your website broken? When it loads the front page (home) I see some icons flash on screen for about a second.. best i can make out these are GENERAL, FAMILY and some other icons.. but as soon as the slideshow appears those icons are gone... the only icons showing on front page are POLO EVENTS PHOTOGRPAHY and SPORTS followed by the slideshow...are there supposed to be more?

 

[Tobers]

Ta Kipax - working on that at the moment. Basically, they shouldn't appear at all, let alone flash up. Cheers for the heads up. Mostly works ok on Firefox but not IE.