Have you ever heard of Sports Illustrated?

So sports is a tough one.

It’s super easy to over shoot and the reality of the relevent life of the pics is very short.

What I mean is pics from a game more than 2 days old hold no value to anyone except maybe selling to players.

Shoot all you want because if you see something you already missed the picture, but remember 90% of sports photography is telling the story.

My advice is set a goal of 10-20 photos that tell the story of the game and 1-2 portfolio/bangers for your use.

Only exception is if you are making money from volume then 2-5 images per player but that is a grind and is a very small portion of the profession

You’re shooting two types of photos here in a way.

The sport and the students.

The sports side you will learn from looking at your work and others. Learning the sport, the action moment, where to locate yourself for the best images depending on your kit. Look close at your mistakes and learn from them.

The student side is getting pictures of the students on the sidelines and candid moments. Get group photos after the games, get smaller grp photos of friends circles. I’ve often found that these are more popular than the action shots.

You may find other togs in your area covering smaller teams and school shorts, look at what they charge for prints/digital and use that as a benchmark.

Good luck and enjoy.

I’m in a similar boat as you, I am in grade 11 and take pics of the VB team and give the pictures to the girls for free with a small watermark. I often walk away from an event with 600-1200 photos and keep only 20-40. When I have my name out there a little more, I’m going to start offering my services for hire and do more individual based work.

I shoot boxing, which involves a lot of burst shooting. For a big event on a Friday I might come home with 5-6000 shots and I get the editing done that weekend ie within 2 days. The matches vary in duration. So let’s say something that goes 12 rounds and takes 45min i might shoot 2000 pics and deliver 200 of them ie 10% are delivered. Not all of these are portfolio worthy of course but the tell the story and are appreciated by the recipients. But I’m shooting this for the club, not for a publication. If I was shooting for sporting news, I’d have to get say 50 pics from the whole evening up within hours of it finishing.

Re editing, you need to get faster. I cull using photo mechanic which is very quick. Then the 10% ish of pics I’ve chosen all go to Lightroom for cropping and editing. They get a generic preset for contrast, clarity, sharpening etc. If I set up the camera properly there will be very little shot to shot adjustment of lighting and WB which speeds it up massively. And if you have the right lens and framing you won’t need to crop much. Only practice will give you better results in camera.

After 2wks they’ll barely remember the match. And might be on to the next one. Sports pics only retain value for a little while unless it’s an amazing portfolio shot.

Cull, cull then cull some more. I shoot fire dancers a lot, and when I’ve got a few thousand photos to go though I will filter light room to only unflagged photos, then press X to reject and P to pick. Just bang it out: if the position isn’t great or there is something clearly technically wrong, just press X and don’t look back. If you realize nothing interesting happened in a set of burst shots, just select them all, hit X and don’t look back.

Speed comes with practice and recognizing the stories that you want quickly. Then that will carry over to your shooting: you’ll know where to look on the field and where the stories are likely to show up so you’ll not take as many bad pictures.

Also, especially as another student, be a little careful about unflattering stories: a near miss is an amazing story that people love to see, but the person who missed it may not be happy about having their failure frozen in time and shared around. If you’re shooting the same people they’ll get to know you and perceived insults stick in people’s minds a lot longer than complements.

FastRawViewer costs $20 one off and can be used to cull really quick before you edit. Would recommend as that’ll shave some time off.

I’m a sports photographer, mainly covering basketball - I’ve shot NBA, NCAA, World Cup and work for the pro team here in Sydney, the Kings.

I actually don’t think you’re overshooting at all, most games I’ll end up with around 1000 photos snapped including pre-game and post if there are any celebration moments worth capturing.

The best piece of advice I can give is this, be discerning and hunt your shots. Don’t look to just spray and pray, be purposeful in your approach. If you’re shooting volleyball then look for specific moments - you might want to capture say a player spiking the ball over the net. Hold steady and snap until you get that shot, then move onto the next. I find some of my favourite shots end up being the in between moments. I make note of where lights and interesting backgrounds are that I can make use of to catch portraits of athletes showing emotion after a play or during down time.

I use Lightroom to process my shots, I’ll have 10 photos selected and edited for social by halftime if I’m editing on the laptop, but can do it instantly if I’m editing on my phone and hot-swapping memory cards. The import process is quick and easy, then I have a preset ready to drop onto photos tailored for each arena I shoot in.

You’ll find a workflow/software that works for you, but know if you want to pursue this to make money being first to market with content you shoot is almost always key. Reach out if you have any questions!

As a reasonably experienced amateur here: Depending on the sport or even just how the teams position on the field, I walk away with 600-2500 images from a sports game, usually the lower end unless it’s particularly action packed. I end up keeping around 10 to 20%, and during processing usually cull that down a bit more. The first time covering a team I tend to overshoot, and might put up a shot of every player just so they have a photo of them, later games I’ll get more picky. This wasn’t a conscious thing, just something that I noticed I do.

I never understood “story” until I tried to put a book together. Even just putting one together in a publishing program as a PDF that you’ll probably never print… is a good exercise in noting the types of shots you’re missing; wide establishing shots of the turf/field, crowds, team celebrations, etc. You’ll think you have heaps of images, but for telling a story you won’t, at least if you shoot like I did.

Practice is the big one also.

And only share your best work. I throw away anything blurry even if it’s the ideal shot from a burst… people only have an opinion of the images you show them, so just show your best stuff. There’s the odd shot that can be artistically blurry though… you’ll work it out ;)