About Me
Hello. I'm a Connecticut based professional photographer. I specialize in sports action photography, portraits, events, video and media services. I've worked as a photographer and a photojournalist for over twenty years covering youth to professional level sports.
What interests me in photography comes from a mix of technology and the need to know how things work. Have you ever stopped at an image because it drew you in but you didn't know why you liked it? It's intriguing because of the subject or the scenery or a special affect in representing something fantasy like. How did they do that? I hear that a lot from people who have seen some of my images. I'll give you an example. Most everybody knows the photographer Ansel Adams. He was landscape photographer and environmentalist. He was made famous for his black-and-white images of the American West. He was an innovator in the dark room. Adams processed an image exposing the photo paper until he got the results he determined represented what he saw with his eyes. You may make the assimilation to Photoshop in today's world. In my first photography class I experimented with this changing the background of an image. I hadn't yet discovered sports photography.
Why do I bring this up? Adams understood that there was more to exposing film and printing it. Which brings me back to the question why you like a photo over another one. There are elements of an image that are subliminal you can't describe them because it has a thing. Using composition, the use of negative space, color representation, perspective, leading lines, exposure, depth of field to draw in an keep the viewer looking. The technical aspect fascinated me. It's not knowing the elements but identifying them in the world. Capturing a 3D image you see with your eyes and trying to get the viewer to see what you saw that's the trick.
The camera is the tool but so is your brain. This isn't hard. A simple device that controls the light entering into a lens that lands on a piece of film or digital sensor. That's it. You control how much light, how long the light enters for and the sensitivity of the film. The fun part is breaking the rules to create an image. Have you ever seen an images of a car with it's tail lights streaked across the frame? The rule you break is to allow more time in exposing the image. Instead of a clear defined image you get a streaked result.
What about sports photography? Sports photography probably is the most fascinating of what I do. I grew up with influences in magazines mostly. In a time where X Games were held on every street block with a cobbled together BMX bike, a piece of wood and a milk crate. We were Travis Pastrana or Tony Hawk. The simplicity of freezing a moment in time sparked this curiosity of how it was made. I certainly wasn't qualified for X Games dominance. There was more than that. An image not only carried a viewers interest but recorded that moment in history. Sure me hitting a jump isn't historical but seeing Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston photographed by Neil Leifer sure is. This mix of journalism and sports photography added an extra element to aspire to.
Sports photography will always hold my interest. It really doesn't matter what level of sports. You can find these moments in any game. You just have to understand, watch and capture.
Justin