I learn a lot from reading & Researching books about Photography
Do you have any favorite books about sports photography? I have many! I'd like to highlight a few here in this post.
The first one I recommend is Peter Read Miller's book "On Sports Photography." Peter is one of the most revered sports photographers, photographing a huge amount of football as well as the Olympics. He's done a lot of sport portrait photos as well. He talks about camera settings, camera set-ups, where he positioned himself, etc. Plus the majority of the photos are done with film cameras!
The second book is my absolute favorite sports photo book, the "2017 Games Photography Book." Not only does it contain hundreds of beautiful color and black and white photos from the 2017 Reebok CrossFit Games, but it shows the camera settings that each photographer used for every photo. I get so inspired by looking thorugh this beautiful book. I wish they'd make one for every single CrossFit Games (since they have had a media team there since day one). I was a small part of this book, because I was a contracted photo editor for CrossFit HQ in 2017 :) Super cool. I have a copy that is signed by each photographer and photo editor from that year.
The third photography book is Lindsay Adler and Erik Valind's "Shooting in Sh*tty Light." It focuses on photographing portraits, both indoors and outdoors, in non-ideal lighting situations. This book is perfect for those of us who shoot sporting events in terrible or wonky lighting. Lindsay uses speedlights often in her book to offset and improve the lighting, but I still think understanding lighting, both natural and artificial, and knowing how to move around to improve your shot is key to good photos, especially sports photos.
The fourth book I like to recommend is Erik Valind's "Portrait Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots." Similar to his book above with Lindsay Adler, this book is all about making beautiful portraits. He covers sports photography a little bit (mostly sports portraits) but talks extensively about camera settings for the best photos, often in the worst lighting situation.
What are your favorite books about photography? I would love to add to my collection! I have many other "coffee table" style photography books, but there books don't provide education or even camera settings (heck, they don't even discuss what kinds of cameras were used to photograph their images!) so they are just books I look at for enjoyment or inspiration. Maybe I'll make a blog post about those books sometime. What do you think??
