Here we go. Hi, I'm Elsa, I'm a
staff photographer for Getty Images.
Based out in New York City, I cover
primarily sports in the New York
metro region for the regular season
and for big events that I
am lucky enough to be on, such as
the World Cup and the Olympics.
I get to travel.
There are a lot of different sports
that I cover.
I cover not only NBA
and NHL Major League Baseball
NFL.
I get to cover a few college
events.
The U.S. Open tennis is here in
queens, so my job as a wire
service photographer is to capture
those defining moments, whether it's
action or reaction that
people are going to be writing about
and talking about later that
day and beyond.
Depending on the event.
I have a game plan in my head.
The more you know what a sport, the
more you can use
that to your advantage to capture
those moments so you don't miss
anything. Baseball for an example,
let's say the bases are loaded.
The pitcher gets you out of a jam.
I know if he strikes out that
batter, I'm going to go straight to
the pitcher to get that reaction.
If he hits a homerun,
I immediately go to the batter, get
that initial reaction.
Then I go to the pitcher and then I
go back to the batter, rounding the
bases while he meet his teammates
at home plate to get the
celebration.
I looked at it. It was about 50
seconds from when that first pitch
was delivered.
The batter hit the ball and the
grand slam was hit.
If you have a game plan in your head
of where to go, you can walk away
with six or seven pictures from
that moment within less than a
minute that tell that story
not only from the defensive side,
but from the offensive side.
So as far as my equipment goes, I
shoot with Canon.
All of my lenses are canon lenses.
This is my basic kind of day to day
sort of kit. And so let's
dive right in, shall we?
I have a 1D X Mark III.
Most events that I shoot, I use
between two and three camera bodies
minimum. And then obviously,
if it's a bigger event and I'm using
remote cameras will have a bigger
setup.
So with the R series lenses, you can
still use EF lenses, but you need
this this adapter.
I'm starting to get some of the
R series lenses as well, so here's
a 70-200 with a telescoping
zoom. If you're running around the
sideline, it'll start to kind
of drift after a while.
It will kind of start to say a
little bit. There's this lovely
little lock function, so when you're
running around, so that was
kind of a nice addition that I
thought I saw this lens here.
This is my bread and butter sort
of of lens on the short side of
things. 70-200 f/2.8.
This is kind of your great overall
lens that you could shoot tennis,
golf, basketball,
volleyball, all different
sports where you just need that
short telephoto.
This is perfect for that.
When you think of sport photography,
you think of that big, long glass,
but there are a lot of things that
you can do with some shorter lenses.
Example is a few years ago,
there was a really foggy Yankees
game. They were playing the Twins,
and there were a couple
of nice pictures that I liked.
But one of my favorite was of
Stanton just walking out onto
the field
in the fog, and I shot that with a
24-70mm.
It gets you something nice and wide
if you need something wide like a
24mm or if you need
a little bit more closeness.
And so like, you know, often I use
this and I said it at a 50mm.
It just gives you a good bit of
variety.
Another favorite lens of mine is the
16-35mm f/2.8.
I use this a lot in
remote camera work, or if I'm
at a bigger event and I want to show
a full stadium full of fans with
action going on on the court or on
the field of play.
This allows me to shoot this
nice wide atmosphere picture
doesn't, you know, distort the ends.
It's important to
have clean backgrounds.
A lot of us do that by
using prime lenses and shooting
wide open at like, say, f/2.8.
So a big
lens that I use often for a
lot of sports is a 400m f/2.8, and
I'm shooting it at f/2.8 As often as
I can.
This is the version II Canon 400mm f/2.8.
I use this for everything
and football, basketball, baseball,
soccer, you name it.
This is this is my go to lens.
I love the of the lens.
I love that it compresses the
background really nicely.
I love shooting at it wide open at
f/2.8.
I've been pairing it with my
adapter and my R3 lately,
and it's it's been phenomenal.
When comparing these two cameras,
this is the DSLR.
This is 1D X Mark III.
This is the R3.
So the mirrorless will shoot 30
frames a second.
This shoots about 14.
You can have a silent shutter with
this, even when the silent
shutter is disabled. So I have it on
first curtain electronic so you can
hear the shutter going.
It's still pretty quiet.
So this is what you know how
fast 1D X Mark III and
how loud it will be.
Pretty fast.
So this is the R3
on the
electronic shutter.
You know, with the first curtain
sync, so you can hear it.
A little faster,
but if you shut off the first
curtain mode, just put it straight
on electronic.
You can't really hear anything.
So this is great for
shooting something where it's really
quiet.
If you're a news photographer, if
you're in a very delicate situation,
if you're shooting golf, if anyone
has ever shot golf, you know that
you never shoot in a golfer's back
swing, especially if you're really
close to them. Because they can,
they can hear this little shudder.
You know how quiet it is outside.
And they get really
angry. If you use
something like this and you're
shooting in their back swing, they
can't hear it.
And then they won't yell at you.
And their caddie won't yell at you,
which is a glorious thing.
What I really love about basketball
is those really tight games and
those buzzer beater moments and
you know, when an athlete when
you shoot that last second shot
to win the game, the celebration is
going to be epic, certainly in this
picture.
This was one of those buzzer beater
sort of moments.
They beat Connecticut to advance to
the final final game, and
just the pure joy in
both of their faces is what really
makes it for me.
So this is what I look for as a
sport photographer. I'm drawn to
more of these celebration moments
than I am, say the action pictures,
because I feel like there's a more
of a human connection with with
these kind of pictures.
I like to shoot a little tighter
down court just to get
that sort of chaos in this
picture from a Lakers vs Knicks game
shot this season.
I really just love how the defense
just swarmed all over Julius Randle,
and so that's what I
look forward to try and
find something a little different,
but it's still hard action.
When you're covering the same thing
over and over and over again,
you try and find different angles to
tell a different kind of side of the
sport. Sport photographers often use
remote cameras to do that to be in
two places at once, and so I
set up a remote camera on the shot
clock. The lens that I used for that
was a 35mm and
I used a
1D X Mark III camera body.
And so I focused it on
the net. And with the idea of
using it for the net cutting after
the Championship, you see the
confetti on the floor.
She's looking back at her team
and she's waving that piece and that
it helps kind of break up that set
of images with, you know, action
reaction moments shot
with a 300mm, moments shot with a
70-200mm, and then you have
the remote camera shot with a 35mm.
This winter, I did
some short track speed skating at
the Games in Beijing.
If you're not familiar with short
track and relay, when they're
getting ready to switch off skaters,
they sort of mirror each other
and pair each other on the inner
part of the of the ice.
I was trying to find a way to not
only show this, but show that they
are moving very, very quickly.
I slowed that shutter speed down to
a fifteenth of a second, and for
me, I always want something sharp,
and so I was focused on that lead
skater in the
main part of the race.
It took a couple of of laps
around to kind of frame it to just
be right where everything paired up
nicely.
I find that when shooting at
a slower shutter speed, it is easier
to do the pan pictures with
a DSLR than it is the mirrorless.
I think more so because of the
timing sort of thing of it.
You're looking through the
viewfinder that's looking through a
mirror, and so you're seeing what
the actual frame is, whereas the
mirrorless, it's it's
about an approximation, even just
that little millisecond of time.
It makes it a little more difficult
to do sort of a pan
picture with a mirrorless.
At least I found that's kind of a
learning curve that I'm running into
with switching between a DSLR
and a mirrorless camera.
At the
Olympics in Tokyo, I
covered a few of sporting events,
but one of the favorite pictures
that I have from it is
of the women's bronze medal soccer
game between the U.S.
and Australia.
So there was this one shaft light in
the corner and thankfully
Megan Rapinoe was going after
the ball in this chapter.
Like, I love that her
and the defender are making the
exact same sort of motion.
I like to look for patterns.
The fact that the Olympic Rings logo
is behind it is all lit up.
I thought that this was this was
perfect and it couldn't get any
better.
For the World Sport Photography
Awards, I chose a variety of images
to enter based on
the look and feel of them, the
different techniques used.
The first picture I want to talk
about is a velodrome picture.
It was from the 2016 Olympics in
Rio.
I had never shot velodrome before
and it was the craziest thing I'd
seen and I used
a 1D X Mark II
and a
24-70mm f/2.8. I shot this at a
quarter of a second and as they
were rounding the corner, I would
start my pan as it were coming up.
And then as soon as they come by
and try and mimic the speed of the
cyclist so I could keep at
least the helmet sharp.
Another image that I used
as an entry was handball.
The Norwegian player
Stine Bredal Oftedal is flying into
the air. She's just getting
mauled by her, by the
defense. This image was shot with a
70-200mm on a
1D X Mark II.
This image of placed gold
in the World Sport Photography
Awards, so this was from a Yankees
Red Sox wild card playoff
game. I've shot enough baseball.
I know that when it's
when I hear the crack of the bat,
I kind of know if it's going to be a
ground or was going to be pop fly
out. And so I knew this is going to
be an infielder.
It was kind of pop and fast.
Brock Holt, who was on the Red Sox
at the time I used a 400mm and
it's a perfect frame, full
frame. He fits in nicely
and I what I really love is that he
just gets so high off the ground.
It just really makes
baseball fun.
I love everything that I do, and
I don't want to change any of it,
but maybe just expand into
a few more sports that are, you
know, shoots more rugby or
some lacrosse, you know, things that
I don't get to do often enough and
that are still really fun and really
exciting.