Ryu Voelkel in Five Photographs
One of the men behind ‘Big Lens, Fast Shutter’, Ryu is an accomplished sports photographer.
I've often wondered about the people who line the pitch at football matches. They have weather-sealed cameras that can shoot at 11 frames per second; their lenses are so big that they require a mono-pod to properly balance them. Their kit bags contain equipment that runs to the tens of thousands of dollars. And when they get good at their line of work, they can become the most interesting photographers out there.
Ryu Voelkel is a photographer with years of experience behind him. He has covered almost every sporting event you can think of, from top-flight football to ice-skating to mixed martial arts; no matter the sport he is commissioned to follow, he soon develops a way of looking that leads to the creation of the most captivating images.
Those of us who sit on the sidelines and do no more than dream about taking these kinds of photos need people like Ryu. We need them for our vicarious imaginings, but also for their expertise, and this, besides his photographs, is Ryu’s greatest gift. Through his website Big Lens Fast Shutter, Ryu and his colleague Matt Cohen present articles that can guide even experienced hands through the labyrinthine world of sports photography.
My mistake when I first tried shooting a football match was to only get the action. The professionals know that you need to get much more than just a sharp, clean image of a man kicking a ball. You need to tell the bigger story, and by looking at the kinds of photos used to tell the tale we can all better appreciate both the sport and the craft of the photographer.
- Samir Nasri, Arsenal vs Barcelona, 2011
The first thing a sports photographer must do, naturally, is to capture the action. Every sport has its vernacular of photography. What would a football photograph be if it did not include the ball? Though it is not always a requirement, if the ball is out of the frame in a typical action shot the drama is lost, and the appeal with it.
This is one example out of dozens of incredibly sharp, incredibly clear photos that I have seen in Ryu’s portfolio. Notice the way Samir Nasri has been isolated from the action, drawing attention to his grace in leaping, and the look on his face as he attempts to keep the ball under control. As well as giving us something of the action in the match, Ryu has succeeded in communicating the athleticism inherent in the sport.
2. UCI Track Cycling World Cup 2012 London
When you’ve captured a smattering of the action, the next thing that every good photographer must do is to give their audience a sense of the place where the event took place. This can be done with crowd reaction shots — a commonplace in football photography — or by illustrating the scale of the venue, as in this wide-angle shot.
On the face of it this looks like a simple photo to take, yet it is deceptively difficult to get anything that looks so crisp and well-composed. Consider the challenges Ryu faced: he had to find the best location, wait for the cyclist to approach, get the shutter speed fast enough in the low light, and get the focus right on a swiftly moving object. Then consider how difficult wide-angle lenses can be to use properly in the first place, and suddenly the image becomes even more striking.
3. At Eric Bompard, 2012
Many sports lend themselves to the preparatory shot, an image showing the focus of the competitors before the event itself. In this example Ryu uses negative space — giving up half of his shot to a red wall — to show how the athlete has managed to take herself away from the world around her. Her blank stare, her neutral expression, suggest that whilst she is stretching and preparing her body for the exertions ahead, she is also readying her mind for the mental stress to come.
4. Chelsea vs Benfica Lisbon, 2012
One of the hardest skills, possessed by only a small proportion of sports photographers, is the ability to take an ordinary moment and turn it into art. The shot above must have been incredibly difficult to achieve; I can only look at it and wonder.
This is an example of a technique called ‘panning’, where a slightly longer shutter speed is chosen, and the camera follows the subject, keeping its place in the frame constant. With a bit of practice it’s an easy enough thing to do if you want to get a photo of a cyclist ambling past on a country road. The smaller the subject, and the further away it is, the harder it becomes to get something visually appealing. The difficulty grows exponentially. Take a close look at the football in the picture above: it’s perfectly captured, and looks like something alien, a planet in motion, haunted by the ghost of a footballer.
5. Freiburg vs Bayern München, 2013
The final category of sports shot to consider is the detail shot. These are far harder to get right than it would seem, because if you don’t approach the subject the right way you can end up with an overly simplistic image approaching cliche. For instance, it’s easy to get a photograph of the manager reacting to the referee, or seeing his team score a goal, but of course it’s easy: the manager hardly moves compared to the players on the pitch. Likewise the fans: take a wide-angle lens and point it towards the stands and just start clicking. Eventually you’ll get something that tells a reasonable story.
But when you mix technique, experience, and talent you can get something special, like the image above. To people who care passionately about the sport, you don’t need a caption to tell you anything about the subject of this photograph. The dark suit, the starched white shirt cuff, the pointing finger; it could only be Pep Guardiola, formerly of Barcelona and now manager at Bayern Munich.
This is the kind of detail shot that tells a story worth telling, so it’s no surprise to find it in the portfolio of Ryu Voelkel, sports photographer extraordinaire.
