Quote Originally Posted by Dallasphotog


Go shoot sports. Anything you can find will do, but high school baseball, softball and soccer make great starter sports. There are usually fewrestriction on access andtons of games on all nights of the week.


Shooting sports will force you to learn a lot about photography. The light will vary at each event forcing you to learn every facet of shutter speed, ISO and aperature. You'll have constant changes of composition and all kinds of interesting color and movement. You'll also learn to get images quickly and work in a noisy, crazy environment.


The upside is you can work on candid portraiture by shooting the band, drill team and cheerleaders as well.


I've always believed my wedding skills came from my sports work. If you can shoot a running back coming straight at you in crappy light with 3,000 kids clanging cow bells in the stands behind you, weddings will look tame in comparison.
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Go shoot fires. Work with your local fire department (or find a website or scanner that'll let you follow them independently, but working WITH them will help grease the skids with the cops) and go shoot fire runs. At sporting events, you can get to the shoot as early as you want. At fires, you'd better have your bag/kit well laid out, memory cards loaded, settings preset, etc. If it's a house fire, you have at best 30 minutes of good shooting; after that, it's time for candids of the weary faces of the crews because your original subject no longer exists.


I used to manage a mini-website that tracked San Antonio FD's live dispatches (they now do most of what I was doing then at http://epay.sanantonio.gov/activefire/). I saw this apartment fire come in as I was getting ready to leave work. A ten-minute drive in evening rush hour (plus a few minutes of head-start for the FD) meant I wasn't as early as I wanted, but here's what I got: http://www.sanantoniofire.org/scene/...ec28/index.htm. Another night, I was leaving the bar at 0130, and saw friends of mine in a ladder truck heading the same direction I was going. Here's what I got: http://www.sanantoniofire.org/scene/fire_scene/2008_nov09/index.htm.


If you can shoot a fire in progress in crappy light (expect orange/red glow from the fire, red/blue glow from the warning lights, halogen scene lights, and lots of reflective striping to annoy your flash), sports will be easy.