Eight years of sports photos

Eight years ago this week I covered my first sectional as a professional photographer. There was not much to it back then as I was an infant when it came to sports photography.

It was a girls basketball sectional in Whiteland as I took photos for the Southsider Voice of Center Grove, Franklin Central and Greenwood. Franklin Central went on to win the sectional.

I call girls basketball sectional week the Super Bowl for high school sports editors. Mainly because the week feeds into Super Bowl Sunday.

Plenty has changed in eight years. I now live in a county I knew nothing about 20 months ago. I still use my Nikon D3200 though. The lenses have changed but the camera body remains the same.

Eight years ago I noticed how little media attention high school sports teams around Indy received. It led me to push sports on the social media pages for the weekly paper I contributed too. The social media tactics I used then are still important to me in 2022.

Today, girls basketball still lacks media attention. In some pockets of Indiana, so does boys basketball and football.

Sports photography companies have tried to capitalize on this. Varsity Views was a big company the Indianapolis Star relied on 10 years ago. That company went out of business as it is difficult to make money with sports photos.

Eight years ago, I couldn’t tell if my camera was a hobby, a job or a career. Today, it’s all three.

Stories are still important, but over the last eight years I have seen how vital it is to get photos out of the teams we care about locally. The camera is the artillery of the newspaper. Stories act as infantry but they can’t advance without quality artillery support. The same holds true for how a story will get overlooked without quality images.

I am probably one of the few sports editors in the state who will take a quality photo gallery over a story anytime. My writing will never be able to capture the emotion of sectional game the way a camera can.

Well, time to head out to my Super Bowl.

Nathan is the sports editor of the Greene County Daily World and can be reached at npacegcdw@gmail.com. His “Low Budget Sports Show” Airs Weekly on Facebook Live.