My first job was at a small town newspaper – which is how I found myself suddenly spending every fall Friday night standing on the sidelines, listening to the smack of shoulder pads and photographing high school (American) football.
I never set out to be a sports photographer – in fact, I never really set out to be a photographer at all, but my first writing job was one that put a camera in my hands and, once I started, I found I never could really bear to put it down.
I’m not the sort of person that you would have expected to see working the late-night sports desk – I’m a bit of a nerd, more comfortable with a good book than cheering on a team from a sports bar. But, if you had walked into the newsroom around midnight on a Friday in the fall, there I was, a geek with a camera, quickly typing up the game and editing photos from my entry-level DSLR on a desktop Mac that, even at the time, was a bit of a dinosaur.
I was never much of a sports fanatic, but I worked at a newspaper that covered four towns with three writers, so I found myself quickly learning to anticipate the plays and adjust to where I was on the sidelines.
There’s something about watching the game close enough to hear the smack of shoulder pads, to smell the sweat from the fields and the popcorn from the stands. There’s just something to watching the game through a viewfinder, with the constantly looming threat of needing to jump out of the way of a play that comes too far out of bounds to keep the adrenaline flowing.
After experiencing that, in fact, watching a game on the TV just isn’t the same. Will I tune into the Super Bowl this weekend? Tune in to the Winter Olympics? Yeah, but I will probably spend just as much time trying to spot which cameras are on the sidelines as I do watching the actual plays. I miss the thrill that comes with not just watching the play, but trying to catch the action on camera, and the thrill that comes when I manage to get the timing and perspective just right.
I’m no longer a sports photographer, but my time spent on the sidelines with a camera in hand is still an era of my life that I look back on fondly. I don’t regret my experience at all – though it does mean watching a football game on TV comes with a pang of envy for the photographers able to see the action in person.
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