"Sports Photography-Techniques Applicable to Any Photo Subject"
by Andrew Katsampes-MA
Monday, September 17, 7:15 PM


Our second presentation for the new club season comes to us from GLPA member Andrew Katsampes. His program will be a discussion of several topics from the viewpoint of sports photography, but these topics are relevant to any photography. Discussed will be criteria for evaluating a sports image and comparing to the criteria for a nature image, importance of unobtrusive backgrounds, white balance, histogram, and metering comments, which apply to sports and nature. Also covered will be guidelines for cropping sports images. Cropping is analogous to finding the sculpture in the block of granite. Sports have ‘handedness,’ which affects body position and face location, for example modern polo is played only right-handed and rugby is played equally with either hand. These are important elements to the game that you should research before hand when shooting sports.

Andrew states-‘When game action gets slow, random thoughts, ideas, and connections start floating around inside his head. This presentation is Tufte inspired, less spontaneous, more polished version of these thoughts.’

Our speaker attended Hamilton College, and earned master’s degrees in chemistry and pharmacology. He started out as a system software developer who migrated into applications with Corodale, UCCEL, Computer Associates, Fidelity, and finally Brown Brothers Harriman. He did do some photography after college and then stopped for 10 years or so before venturing into the field again. He is currently a multi-year member of Greater Lynn and the real webmaster for our website responsible for all the technical items and coding. He is also responsible for all the innovative tools and pages on the site that make it easier to work on and much more beneficial for our membership. His work helps facilitate everything from online registrations for field trips, courses, socials, and workshops, to the uploading of images for monthly competitions.

He now photographs MLS New England Revolution, NWSL Boston Breakers, and selected local college games for International Sports Images (isiphotos.com). He also photographs international soccer matches at Gillette Stadium and Rentschler Stadium in Hartford, CT. In 2015 he photographed the FIFA Women’s World Cup hosted by Canada, at the Moncton venue.

After Andrews presentation we will have a brief discussion with Larry Dunn on how to enter the Print Competitions.