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"I think it's an extremely average picture."
Uh oh. Maybe the "tell-me-about-this-photo-I-randomly-like" game wasn't such a good idea, and maybe my taste in photography wasn't nearly as refined as I thought.
"The lines are crooked. This one isn't out of the water..."
In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have led with a picture of synchronized swimmers, mostly because I know close to nothing about synchronized swimming. I thought it was a cool picture, and it seemed fitting with the Summer Olympics on the horizon.
"There's no way I edited this one."
Meet Al Bello. He is the Chief Sports Photographer for Getty Images, and he’s not far behind Mike Ozanian atop my “people-I-could-listen-to-for-hours” power rankings. He played football at Stony Brook, a school that had no photography program, and he wasn’t able to take a photography elective until his senior year when a scheduling change meant the course no longer conflicted with practice. That class was the extent of Bello’s formal education in his chosen field.
Here's what I learned about what it takes to be top photographer in the sports media world (and no, I'm not showing you the "extremely average" picture):
Hustle.
Bello took a job out of college as darkroom manager for The Ring boxing magazine, which meant processing and printing film. But he got to photograph boxing on the weekends, and three years later, he became a junior photographer at Allsport (now part of Getty). He’s been grinding ever since.
“Most people don’t realize all the time and effort that goes into it. People think ‘you get to go to games and sit on the sidelines.’"
The reality is that Getty Images covers more than 30,000 sports events per year, and photographers capture A LOT of images. How many images? At this year’s Super Bowl: 50,000. 1,500 of those are distributed to customers.
Over 106,000 of Getty’s editorial images are credited to Al Bello.
Preparation.
“I start days ahead of time. I get everything in the camera room laid out, think about what’s going to happen, what could happen, make sure all equipment is ready, get to an event two or three hours before hand, make sure there’s internet…"
Basketball:
“Install remotes up in the ceiling, underneath the basket, run up and down and get discs, cards, carrying all that equipment, transmit the images, edit the images, run back onto the court before halftime’s over. Down up down up, run run run..."
Football:
“Warmups start an hour ahead of the game. Sometimes Getty has special requests like images of the quarterback warming up or a player who’s coming back from suspension. Always quarterbacks first. If it’s a nice day, work around the light."
Winter sports:
“Crack of dawn for downhill skiing. You gotta ski the same route, find a place where you won’t get hit, get OK’d by ski patrol, and if you don’t, you have about 10 minutes to find a new spot. If you don’t get it right, your shoot’s over."
I’ll admit that I was more than a little self-conscious after that initial AVERAGE synchronized swimming photo, so I played it safe with the second one and rattled off the editorial number for a ski jumping picture featured in Bello’s portfolio on his website.
“I’m looking at ski jumping, right?” By his tone, I could tell he was much more pleased by this selection.
It turns out that in order to get this shot, Bello found a place in the snow, laid down and stayed there for hours to claim his territory. As the day began to turn to evening, the lighting situation was challenging, but the end result was something pretty special:
“Each sport is different. Dress correctly. Like the mailman. Gotta be ready for anything."
Love of (and respect for) the game.
Remembering that Bello was a New Yorker, the next image I picked was one that I had found while working on a separate project about the New York Yankees. As a sports fan myself, this one left me a little choked up, and I hoped it would tug at Bello’s heartstrings as well:
“Did you just send me Mariano?”
Got him. The image was from Rivera’s last season at Yankee Stadium, and Bello wanted to capture the baseball legend in the most appropriate way possible:
“If you ever want to make an athlete look bigger or stronger, ‘larger than life,’ you shoot up on him. If I had stood up and took it, it would have been 100% different."
He then went onto gush about baseball’s most prolific closer:
“I wanted to get this shot right. I didn’t want it to look sloppy. [Rivera] is everything you want in an athlete…it’s been a pleasure covering Mariano throughout his career."
Which images are most valuable to Bello as a photographer?
“The ones that stand out among the rest of the media covering the event. There’s no greater joy than when I can get a photograph surrounded by a hundred other photographers and come away with something different. ‘How can I get a different picture than everyone else?’ If everyone can get a great picture, there would be no great pictures."
Intricate knowledge of the sports you cover.
Bello told me that sports photographers must know the sports they’re covering, citing obscure sports like Sepak takraw (think volleyball but with your feet) and Kabaddi (like a really intense game of tag) as examples. When a photographer has to figure out what’s happening on the spot, they’re much less likely to capture images of any significance.
As an example, take one of Bello’s favorite images:
“When boxers fight close, when they put their head in the other guy’s chest, they’re more susceptible to uppercuts.”
Explaining that at the time, he was going through a sort of drought when it came to capturing great boxing images.
“One of the hardest things to do is time a boxing punch."
Which made this shot that much sweeter:
Especially when something big happens.
You might recognize the next image I’m going to show you, but let me tell you a little bit about it first...
MetLife Stadium’s scoreboard doesn’t make for very pretty pictures aside from those captured from one of the two end zones, so Bello was all the way at the end of the field.
Second, because the majority of the action shots in football come from photographers training their cameras on the quarterback, this shot started with Bello focused on Eli Manning. “Sometimes I let myself look around,” Bello explained. He looked around to locate the ball, realized it was still in the air and adjusted to capture an image of what was simultaneously being called “the catch of the year” by television commentators and a significant portion of the social media world.
Look familiar?
Bello captured the entire sequence: the throw, the catch and the celebration that followed. He turned to his editor and said, “I think this is a big deal."
He was right. Everyone was talking about Odell Beckham Jr.’s circus catch. Everyone was looking for that photo.
And Bello had it.
Speed.
When asked about how the industry has changed in the past 5, 10 years, Bello’s answer was simple:
“Speed. Everything has gotta go out yesterday. The speed in which photos are being delivered now…In the early 90s, it took 25 minutes to send one photo. If you sent six images per night, you did your job. Now, six images go in six seconds. You have to be sending photos before the end of the national anthem."
Embrace technology.
Like what often seems to be the case with veterans in other industries, I expected Bello to be at least a little jaded when it came to my questions about technology, but his response was actually quite refreshing:
“Cameras are getting better. Images are higher quality. It’s a very exciting time. Especially for photographers who are good. Technology made crappy photographers average, average photographers good, good photographers great and great photographers astounding."
I've been quoting that line ever since this interview.
“Great photographers still stand out. The one thing that has not been lost is the effort to make great photos. When that goes away, I will go away."
