Professional skating photography

[Digitalwave]

Both times I have posted up skateboarding pictures, people have complained that I froze the action and they look posed.

I have numerous skating magazines and I went through them this weekend. Out of the thousands of published photos, I didn't see a single one that showed any visible blur or action. They were all frozen.

Is there any reason why people want to see action in my shots when thats not the industry standard? Or maybe nobody has seen professional skate photography before?

[picture-this]

Nobody has seen it. Though creative intentions are good, there is nothing worse then a skate photo done by someone who doesnt skate.

[primoz]

There are two different things you are talking about... well maybe not in your case, but personally I never had much "luck" with editors being a bit more open minded. About 80% of stuff I send are so called "industry standard" shoots. Plain simple and seen few 100.000 times. With one word boring, just because of previous mentioned things. Rest of 20% are a bit different shoots, but in most of cases I get "cool! great shoots" and that's it. They usually don't get published even if they thought it's "cool shoot". So in magazines you were probably looking those "boring shoots". But on the other hand I guess you were talking with those guys who you were shooting. They have completely different point of view then editors does. For them it doesn't matter if it's sharp or not. But it matter that photo shows their trick, and even more important, that it shows they made that trick till the end and not fall in between. No idea for skateboarding but with snowboarding it's pretty easy to shoot this way. I don't shoot snowboarding really much, but still enough that I found out how those guys are thinking about photography. And I don't shoot skateboarding at all, but I guess they are pretty similar people.
So on the end you need to know for who you are shooting because you will end up with completely different shooting style if shooting for those kids then you would if shooting for some magazine.

[Digitalwave]

primoz, excellent advice. In this case the skaters loved the pics. The people that didn't were from critique posts I have posted on various photography forums. I guess that in the end if the skater was happy that matters more than people here, right? I'm just trying to improve though and it was strange to realize that all the pros shoot the freeze action shots, yet everyone here wants to see more action...

[transcend]

Industry standard and good picture are 2 very different things. Same thing happens in the cycling industry, and leads to 9 million "coming straight at you at 300mm" rider shots.

Mix it up and you get great photos, but most won't sell.

[sugazo]

if you feel a little adventurous, sign up and post at http://skateperception.com/
forums for skateboard photogs/videogs essentially. but if they dont like your shot, you'll hear it loud and clear--members arent as nice as they are here at potn.

[Bruce Hamilton]

...there is nothing worse then a skate photo done by someone who doesnt skate.

Being Tony Hawk doesn't make you Ansel Adams. :rolleyes: