Insight Into Shooting Skateboarding

The other day I wrote a review about the X100t and how I managed to get great photographs doing street photography. In this post I will take it a bit further, talking not about the camera, but about using a camera with a fixed 35mm lens to shoot skateboarding, using creativity and composition over using expensive equipment.

General Tips

For starters Composition is key in photography, it does not matter if you’re shooting with the most expensive camera equipment or your new iPhone 6s, if you don’t know your composition you might as well start over. Remember to study: Rule of Thirds, Leading Lines, Rule of Odds, Framing, Rhythm, etc (Please leave a comment if you wish for me to do a tutorial series on these topics). Also, it is very important for a photographer to study other great photographers, learn from their photography and put their techniques to the test. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to look at somebody’s work you like, and try to mimic their process, you might be surprised of what you’d learn.

Make Your Photography Different

When talking about skateboarding photography, there aren’t many guides on how to shoot something. As a matter of fact, skateboarding photography is strongly subjective to the creativity and uniqueness that a photographer can bring to the table. Remember, we live in a world were we are constantly bombarded with imagery, good and bad, and we have stopped paying attention to great images due to our overly fed brains. So, what you do different will not only define you, but will make you stand out from others.

Understand Skateboarding as a Sport and as a Lifestyle

Skateboarding photography is not a matter of just pressing the shutter and having a good exposed photograph, it is about the relation a photographer has with a skater. It is not an easy task to jump down a sixteenth stair, while getting your body wrecked various times to just land the trick once and get a cool clip out of it. The photographer must be aware of that, and he must sort of play the roll of a psychologist, where you as a photographer must encourage the skater to try a certain trick, but must photograph what the skater did in a way that someone that doesn’t know skateboarding, could tell what was going on at that moment. Also, by understanding the lifestyle of a skateboarder you’ll be getting shots that no one else is getting. Document what is going on around the skater, not only the tricks, photograph their interactions, the things they eat, what they wear, the things they enjoy besides skateboarding, take cool portraits…All that other stuff will make your skateboarding photography much better.

Two Words: Long Lens

Understand that fisheye is not always the best option, specially when fisheye shots are so saturated in skateboarding mags. Remember that old 18-55mm kit lens that you have sitting around in your room piling up dust? Well, learn how to use it. Leave the fisheye at home for one day and shoot long lens for a whole skate session, I promise that you will start noticing a dramatic difference in your photos. Which by the way, long lens can really help your skateboarding images look less generic than others photographers. Now don’t get me wrong I love the old school fisheye skate angle, but I’ll always take the long lens angle of that kickflip fs crook of Nyjah Huston in his Rise & Shine part. 

Black & White Over Color

If you’re familiar with my images (or have observed my images in this post enough) you would notice that I absolutely love black and white photography, but curiously there is not much of that in skateboarding nowadays. I don’t think shooting color is wrong, I just believe there is a time and a place to shoot color, rather than black and white that for me, should always be what you shoot. But my tip here is that if you’re shooting skateboarding most of the images will be somehow geometrical, because of the spot the guys are skating at., so keep an eye out for that. Use it to your advantage, look at shapes rather than color and build your image from there, most likely than not, your images will become more compelling and create more shock than just a boring color image.

As photographer Ted Brant said “When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”

Well, I hope this somehow gives you an insight into skateboarding photography, as well as a few useful tips you could use later in your photography, generally. Remember to comment, share and subscribe to the Blog down below, it will be greatly appreciated, plus you’ll get notifications whenever I publish a new article here on the Blog and may even get free stuff now & then. Also, follow me on Instagram @JosephLopezPhotography to see all the Images I don’t post on the blog or the website. Hope you enjoyed this article and I’ll be posting more stuff soon.