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Growing up in Bermuda gave Guilden M Gilbert Jr a penchant for football and cricket, which inspires his love of shooting all manner of sports today
A Bermuda-based reader shows off his memorable series of sporty shots of cricket, football and athletics
My parents tell me I took an interest in cameras at a very early age, but my passion truly began back in 1981, as a 14-year-old, where I elected for photography as a hobby while participating in the Duke of Edinburgh Awards.
We shot and developed black-and-white film, printing the images in the darkroom. Seeing the photographs appear in the print development process helped to get me hooked on this hobby. I bought an SLR and ran through between eight and 10 rolls of film a week, that was when I really learned photography.
Since then my camera gear has changed a lot, and for these images gear was definitely important. I needed reach, filling the frame being a key reason these images work.
Shooting under stadium lights requires a sensor that can handle high ISO and provide great image quality – stadiums are darker than people think.
Growing up in Bermuda I played and loved two sports, cricket and football. I captured the cricket photo during the Annual Cup Match Classic in Bermuda [1]. This is played between two Bermudian cricket clubs – St. George’s and Somerset – and is a celebration of emancipation (the abolition of slavery). This year (2018) was the 117th edition.
Photographing cricket requires patience and timing; sometimes you can almost sense that a wicket is about to fall and you prepare for it. My personal preference, when shooting a sport like cricket, is to ensure that the ball gets included in the shot.
But I don’t just shoot ball games. This is American
sprinter Dezerea Bryant coming out of the blocks in the 4x100mm Relay during the IAAF World Relays event in Nassau, Bahamas, April 2017 [2]. I wanted to capture the explosive power of a sprinter launching out of the blocks, so I needed a shutter speed of 1/800 sec to freeze her motion.
Fast shutter speeds are important for capturing moments of time. Take this shot of a Trinidad and Tobago beach football player during the CONCACAF Beach Football World Cup Qualifiers, for example [3]. A sport like beach football is difficult to shoot because it is such a fast-paced game in such a small space. The ball moves from one end of the field to the other quickly. There’s always action, which can cause one to ‘spray and pray’. But, watching the game closely, these scissor kicks are common and one can start to read the intent of the player.
Speaking of intent of the player, you’re never sure where each athlete is going to end up. This image is very special to me because of my love of football [4]. It was taken at an exhibition game held in the Bahamas, between Tottenham and Jamaica at the T.A. Robinson National Stadium. It was the year Gareth Bale moved to Real Madrid and I believe this may have been one of the last images of him in Tottenham kit.