Top 10 Poses for Sporting Portraiture
Pose Like A Champion Today
Even beyond the apocryphal story, Babe Ruth is a cosmic mystery. Following is proof of the man, the myth, and the legend who transcended a national pastime.
The Babe posed adroitly with arms akimbo in the studied posture of triangle.
Welcome to the wide world of sports photography. They say those who can’t play, coach. And those who can coach, referee. Where does that leave the fan base? Out of the picture. How come the average fan can’t be the photographic subject of sports photography? The question might sound like it came out of left field, but it is not all that different from a question once posed by Erma Bombeck “Why Can’t Our Average Little Family Get Their Own TV Series?” Keeping Up with the Kardashians answered. Sure they can, just not sitcom. So, reality TV was born. Of course we spectators of spectator sports can get our own photographies, just not sports photography. Call it crowd-sourcing.
This new genre of photography, whatever we decide to call it, cannot be artless. The arrangement of unscripted content for a stage set production of standouts in the stands could be a lot of work. On the other hand, it could be great fun.
It surprised me that I could buy a mass-produced home plate, although I don't know why it should have, considering that one can custom-order a baby nowadays. Suppose I installed it carefully, securely, like a gene marker, then laid out a batter's box and baselines. And then my husband urged me to reconsider the line of MLB cases that threw Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes off base, as a way of conforming my ex ante expectations with ex post reality. He is one of the finest writers in the history of the Court. But he authored one of the most implausible, ham-handed lines in the Court’s history when he said in Federal Baseball that “Congress had no intention of including the business of baseball within the scope of the federal antitrust laws.” Now, he never said those words. But the Court says he said them, and the Court gets the last word, so he said them anyway.
We need to steer clear of base paths leading judicious people into major-league quicksand by a free first foot in some ancient verse that admits a line of legal fiction. In other words, we need to touch every base—from how you take photographs to undergo being photographed, the whole nine yards. That is, to pose more than a sporting chance of success. This means learning how to score (1): with a solo shot of your selfie; (2): in a two-shot of your bestie; and (3): by a group of friends who landed a moon shot of their own up in the bleachers.
Plus we need a fashion plate of sportswear cut along a line of jersey in a tailor-made playsuit for us, just as the starting lineup of players who will take part in a game need to dress the part. Too often something is remembered at the last minute and we find ourselves waiting for the stores to open on game day so we can purchase a much-needed item. So here, besides a jersey, we need a game plan. You may want to borrow a page from the NFL and study film for days on end. Wait a minute, I just remembered something about the football of politics and thought of looking to Tom Brady for inspo on posing our very own cheat sheet herewith bound in goat (virtually). Download yours before you take the field.
I stuck a Post-It note on the locker room door to the newsletter here. It has a bullet point diagram to annotate the laundry list of everything you will find inside:
Photo Pose Playbook: Be a crackerjack posing apart from the peanut gallery.
Uniform: Step up to the fashion plate in a playsuit to knock it out of the park.
Your Very Own Cheat Sheet: Take a page from the team poser playbook.
Photo Pose Playbook
This little volume is a picture writing in sequence from an outsider’s eye view of the playing field. The sizzle reel has you learning to model a sporting strain of prizewinning portraiture, candids for reals that admit to capture a real-live crackerjack up in the peanut gallery and the sporting blood of the crowd cheering you on social media at the stadium. The vantage is all yours to win the Internet recognition award of MVP (most valuable poser) with a high-flying exhibition on the means to attain sporty pics. The top 10 looks are postposed in cyclorama and diagrammed for the ‘gram.
1. Something that gladdens
Cheers from the audience. How we love the unexpected turn, like the drinking devil under the table. And we just watched to drink in all those monumental ballparks, dynamic seats full of cheering people, the wonderful story of a national pastime. The be-all and end-all of a candid photo is to reveal the unposed nature of the subject. This is quite the reverse of a detective story meant to conceal the true identity of the suspect and exactly the opposite of sus camerawork, odd bits of locker-room footage, constituting a means (of creepage) rather than an end (for social media).
A smooth-operating, well-made lens for natural light portraits and candids is not it at all. To be on the winning side of every photograph requires an artistry not always fully appreciated. Keep it casual but stay focused on the game, being your wonderfully authentic self on social—from rooting for the home team in a cap to sharing some real talk about yoga during the seventh-inning stretch. Avoid rigid poses. Practice relaxing your shoulders as much as you can. Work on livening your expression. Or else you just have to refuse to let anybody harshen your mellow. Sit astraddle, assuming a laid-back posture of an armrest (as on a chair pose) with your legs.
See the side-by-side example in the above image of showcasing similar actions. One side appears to be more engaged with the camera, whereas the other looks candid, naturally. Each of these approaches offer perfectly valid options for an “unposed” photograph.