Standing outside Eden Park waiting for the Warriors game, I realised I had broken the cardinal rule of sports photography. Although the match was due to start in less than an hour, only a single, shifty looking seagull and myself had bothered to attend. Surely, I thought, the Melbourne Storm Salary Scandal hadn’t affected league this drastically.
Hannah Johnston, pro sports shooter for Getty Images, had arranged to meet me in the media room, which she described as a kind of ˜photo hole’ under the stands. A true professional, once I called her she knew exactly where I’d slipped up: I was at the wrong stadium.
On the way to Mt Smart, the taxi driver explained that although I was an idiot, he’d lost more money than the cost of the cab betting on the Panthers last week. Pointing at the rain on the windshield, he solemnly advised me to stick some cash on the Warriors, who were apparently good in the wet.
Dropping me a couple of kilometres from the stadium, I managed to procure a media pass and trot down the hill onto the ground. From a distance I could see a small figure picking its way along the field, testing a spot and moving up. I gingerly flashed my media pass to a security guard roughly six times my size and struck out onto the pitch.
I reached Hannah somewhere around the centre of the field. She was laughing at me.
The young photographer is one of only a couple of photojournalists in New Zealand working for the major international photography agency Getty, and her images are featured in newspapers and on websites around the world. She’s covered three Olympics and has photographed sports of every stripe. However, given the fact she lives in New Zealand, nine to 10 months of the year she’ll be shooting some variety of rugby. Pick any given match and you’re likely to see Hannah on the sidelines.
The Warriors were squaring off against the Raiders, and Hannah’s sacred duty was to record every bloody try, every punch in the ear, every munted nose.
“You’ve got to generally capture the whole feel of the game,” she says. “You try to get every try — but that hardly ever happens, that you nail everything if you’re roving.”
But before heading out onto the field for the game, Hannah’s first and arguably most important task is to unpack her laptop and establish an internet connection. Newspapers want to publish images of the game as it’s happening. It’s Hannah’s job to make them available as soon as humanly possible, so she will drag her laptop out onto the sideline to upload her photographs as soon as she shoots them.
“Especially with online stuff these days, they want pictures all the time. You’re not just feeding for a hard-copy newspaper,” she explains, pointing out that it’s a cutthroat industry. “You’re competing with the other agencies, so it’s first in, first served.
“It’s harder at a rugby game, where you’ve got to be filing the whole time,” she says. “At an All Blacks match the papers might want something after 10 minutes, so you’ve got to work quite hard to get a picture for a start.”
Once the Warriors and the Raiders thump out onto the field, Hannah is transformed. She darts up the sideline and crouches at the ready. Over her shoulder Hannah carries a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV mounted on a monopod, the latest, fastest pro-level camera body that shoots 10 frames per second. It’s sporting a 400mm f/2.8 prime lens, which by any account is enormous. Slung around her neck is yet another 1D Mark IV, boasting an L-series 135mm f/2.0 instead of the long lens, which she uses to get in close to capture a try.
Although Hannah will use a zoom such as the popular 70-200mm for applications like news, when she’s shooting sport it’s all about speed and sharpness — so prime lenses are the order of the day.
When she’s framing her shot, instead of zooming, Hannah physically moves forwards or backwards to get the player in the image.
“You learn to adjust,” she explains. “You either get closer or you get further away.”
It sounds simple. It’s far trickier in practice. Rugby is fast moving by definition, and Hannah has to quickly run up and down the field to follow the action. After getting in the right place she has to quickly make those infinitely small but critical decisions about how to compose the image and when to take the shot.
“You shouldn’t be scared to let the player fill your frame,” she advises. “I learnt the hard way: when you’re first starting out you’ll shoot something way at the other end of the field because you can actually see the whole thing, but when you look at that photo when it’s on your computer, it’s not going to be a photo. You’ve got to wait, be patient and let it happen.”
Although it might appear as though Hannah’s running about like a decapitated chook, patience, she explains, is key.
“It does look like you just sit there with a big lens and you’re going aimlessly up and down the field,” she admits. “But you’re anticipating the game the whole time; you’re trying to get ahead of the play.”
Hannah is insistent about one thing: to be a good sports photographer you have to understand your code intimately.
“If you want to go for a job at a sports photo agency, you’ve really got to know your sport. You’ve gotta know league, you’ve gotta know rugby, you’ve got to know the game,” she says. I hope she’s not referring to my brief detour to Eden Park. “You’ve got to be up with the news all the time and know who are the new players. If there’s a guy in the news this week, the papers are going to be wanting them.”
The Warriors are down 16-0 when Michael Luck takes a serious biff to the face. He generously spurts blood across the entire field, liberally applying it to members of the visiting team: sports photography gold! Hannah strikes and bags her shot (“He’s cut himself six games in a row now, bleeding from his head. He was bleeding constantly. It’s kinda unhygienic,” she confides). The next day the papers display Hannah’s shot of the footballer’s face looking like a kicked Coke can.
Although Hannah knows all the tricks these days, when she started shooting fresh out of school, she admits she had no clue. The day after her Bursary exams, Hannah went for an interview with Andrew Cornega from the Auckland agency Photosport. Cornega had told her to bring examples of her work.
“I went in my school uniform. I was really, really nervous. It was horrible. For my 7th form [Bursary project] board I did a story on meat, quite graphic kind of stuff¦ not sport at all,” she recalls. “He took one look at my work¦ and chucked them down on the coffee table and was like, ˜What’s this crap? Where’s your sport?’”
Cornega decided to give here a chance anyway. He told Hannah to go out that weekend and shoot any sport she could find. A couple of weeks later she was on the job, where she stayed for five and a half years before moving to Getty.
“I don’t think it mattered about the quality of my work so much, but the fact that I showed keenness,” says Hannah.
Apart from turning pro at such a young age, you might have noticed there’s something else that’s probably noteworthy about the photographer: she’s a girl.
“Every time someone asks you what you do, they automatically ask whether you shoot weddings,” she says. “Because I’m a girl, people are surprised.”
Apparently, being a woman is uncommon among sports photographers.
“All the journos and stuff, they’re all guys, so it’s kind of a testosterone-fuelled thing,” she explains, joking that it’s probably not surprising. “Early on I found it really noticeable going into media rooms. I’m still the only girl.”
Hannah, though, has never been the type to let such a trifle get her down.
“Getting myself taken seriously has been the biggest challenge. You just have to have a really thick skin,” says Hannah. “But at the end of the day we can all go out, have a drink and it’s not a big deal.”
In a rare moment when Hannah’s standing still, I sneak up beside her with my camera to get a shot of her working. A wit in the crowd notices me taking a photo of someone taking a photo and refrains from shrieking insults at the Australians. He kindly reminds me that I’m a ginger. Shooting in front of 30,000 people has its challenges.
Practice, Hannah believes, is the single most important factor in becoming a sports photographer.
“You don’t necessarily need to go to university. I don’t think any of the professional photographers I know did,” she says. “In terms of sports photography, it’s more about practice, practice, practice.”
She also suggests that while most people imagine sports photography as the Dream Job, it, like anything else, can be a pain in the arse.
“Shooting this stuff day in and day out, it does test you a bit. If you’re not that into it then it’s not going to work,” she says. “People think it’s your dream job but it’s horrible conditions, it’s raining¦”
On cue, the sky closes over and enormous globules of freezing rain pelt down. Hannah is oblivious, concentrating only on a steaming scrum of blokes punching one another in the kidneys. I decide it’s time to leave pro photography to the professionals and slink off to watch the rest of the game the way the Good Lord intended: on the telly.
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