Breaking Through – One Shot Story

This is one of the photos I took while courtside at a women’s handball match between the Italian and Bosnian national teams.

I was there as part of the sports photography seminar I run at the university where I also teach sports law. This is why I had to produce teaching materials using a number of pieces of equipment and techniques, ranging from prefocusing with full manual lenses to fast target acquisition and single shot.

This photo was taken with a single shot using a Pentax K-1 Mark II and an SMC Pentax FA* 80–200/2.8 lens and capture the Italian attacker breaking through the Bosnian team’s defence.

As often happens when I am in this kind of environment, I rarely rationalise what I see. By contrast, when the moment comes, something clicks in my mind — pun intended — a fraction of a second before my finger is commanded to press the shutter button. In team sports, there is always a point at which tactical positioning dissolves into raw physical negotiation, and the photo captures exactly one of these moments. To capture moments like this, it is important to understand how the game unfolds, as well as the tactical schemes employed by the teams.

For those who have never taken photos at handball matches before but find themselves faced with such an assignment at short notice, the main piece of advice is this: don’t start shooting as soon as the game starts. Take some time to observe how the athletes move on the court and how they make the ball moving. At one point, the pace suddenly increases and the players start dashing towards the goalkeeper. This movement is either vertical or diagonal, while the rest of the team spreads out on both sides. When the situation looks like this, something is going to happen in the next few seconds. This is when you should switch on as quickly as possible and guess which player will receive the final assist before throwing the ball.

A somehow ‘exoteric’ advice is to go with the flow: by becoming ‘one’ with the action, chaos begins to reveal order, and order makes it easier to freeze ‘the moment’.

I am not claiming to have psychic powers, nor am I suggesting that it is necessary to shoot blindly. On the contrary, my point is that every rhythm has its accents, and recognising where the accent is positioned allows you to anticipate what is going to happen. This works for music, particularly in rhythm-oriented ethnic traditions such as Caribbean, Cuban, Latin and flamenco music, but less so in ‘straight’ music. It is from this that I got the idea.

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