Thursday, November 18, 2010

How to Be a Fast Break Photographer

Quite a few fans of Stanford Women's Basketball bring their cameras to the game, and some of the pictures they take are awesome, gripping, stunning! The purpose of this blog is twofold: one, to give the fan photographers an easy way to share their shots with other fans, and two, to give all fans of the Cardinal Women another place to go to find great pictures of their favorite team!

How to Take Part

As a fan photographer, here's what you do.

  1. Take your camera to a game and shoot, shoot, shoot!
  2. Sort through your pictures and choose the ones you think are worth sharing with other fans.
  3. Upload those to any online photo hosting site—flickr, phanfare, picasa, smugmug, or your own blog—anywhere that we can link to.
  4. Send an email with a link to the particular gallery, and your credit line, to photos (at-sign) Stanfordfbc.org.

That's it. The hardworking mice in the FBC woodwork create one blog post for each game. In that post they put samples of, and links to, each contributor's work.

What About Copyrights and Licenses and Such?

See the very bottom of this page: you retain copyright to your photos, but you allow us to display them under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. That means that we and any other individuals can copy them and use them, but for commercial use you still have control.

Pictures of What Subjects?

Anything your fellow fans would be interested in. Action shots, of course. But also players warming up ... coaches doing their thing ... nice portrait-style head shots of players ... pictures of the LSJUMB and their outrageous hats ... pictures of any of the staff. Anybody who is at the game in an official capacity is a valid subject.

We should be more circumspect when taking pictures of fellow fans. If they go out on the floor, or dress in a flamboyant costume, or carry a sign, fine: they expect to be be seen. But a person just sitting in the stands has a certain expectation of privacy, and you should ask permission to shoot them. (Be especially respectful of team parents. Players are public figures, but their families aren't.)

Do These Have to Be Great Shots?

They ought to be interesting shots. Do yourself the favor of not uploading the ones that didn't come out, the fuzzy ones and the motion-blurred ones and the ones where you juuuuust missed the action.
It's nice if you want to do a little straightening, maybe a little cropping to make the center of interest stand out—but this is ephemeral work, don't spend hours in photoshop getting it perfect, because really, nobody will notice.


How Soon Do We Need Them?

As soon as you can comfortably manage. We'll put up the blog post as soon after a game as we get any pictures. Then we'll keep editing the post to add more links as other contributors email to us.

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