Playing the numbers game

Posted by Gordon King on May 18, 2010 | Comments Off

OK – so you’ve made a good – or even great- sports photograph. It’s got all the elements – good composition, great emotion, interesting lighting, etc. But what if you can’t identify the players in the photo?

It’s a problem we often have when shooting high school sports. Cross country runners don’t wear numbers during meets (except in the bigger meets) Ditto for high school track athletes. This time of year our biggest problem is high school soccer. Many of the teams we cover don’t have numbers on the fronts of their jerseys.

I shot this photo at a recent soccer match.

No numbers. How to identify the players?

One solution is to shoot the backs of the players, where there are numbers.

Sometimes, though, the players don’t turn around soon enough for us to photograph the backs of their jerseys.

Then, we must look for other identifying marks on players. In the first photo above, the player in red has white athletic on his left hand. We can look for that tape in another frame, hopefully a frame in which we can see the jersey number of the player.

Shoes are also good way of identifying individuals since most players wear different shoes with different markings.

If all else fails, we can take a copy of the photo to a coach or other player later in the day (or e-mail it to them) to get help identifying players. But the photo has to be really, really good to merit this amount of effort and often there’s not time to do this.

Trying to sort out players’ identities can be time consuming and frustrating (especially with a looming deadline) but it’s part of the job. We sometimes joke about each of us on the photo staff chipping in money to buy numbers for the fronts of jerseys.

But until that that happens we will continue to photograph back of jerseys and look for tape and different shoes.

–Gordon King