Shooting Seattle U Women's Soccer: What I'm Actually Doing on the Sideline

Soccer is the only sport I shoot, and there's a specific reason for that. Back in 2019 I flew to Portugal for my sister's soccer tournament — she was playing for Team USA against a mix of international teams — and on a whim I bought a Canon AE-1 film camera before the trip. I had no idea what I was doing with it. I just knew I wanted to bring something home besides memory. That camera is basically the reason I do this for a living now.

My sister ended up at Seattle University, playing for the women's soccer team, and that's how those games got into my portfolio. It's not a client I picked up cold — it's family, and it happened to turn into real, technical sports work. One of the action sets from those games is of a player named Zoe H., and if you look at that gallery you're seeing exactly what I'm going to describe here.

Gear, and why

I shoot with a Sony A7IV now, which is a long way from that AE-1. For soccer specifically I'm usually running two bodies or swapping fast between two lenses, because the game moves between two very different kinds of shots. When the ball's on the far side of the pitch I need reach — something in the 70-200mm range so a player's face still reads even from forty or fifty yards out. When play comes back toward my end of the field, especially in the box, I want to be able to open up wide and get closer, tighter framing without cropping the life out of the image in post.

Autofocus tracking matters more in soccer than in almost anything else I shoot. Players change direction constantly, and a keeper diving for a save gives you maybe a quarter-second window. I'd rather have a camera that's already locked onto the eye before I've consciously decided to press the shutter. That's the whole argument for the gear I use — it's not about having the newest thing, it's about not missing the one moment where a girl's boot connects with the ball at exactly the angle that tells the story of the play.

Where I stand

I don't shoot from the stands. I'm down on the touchline, low, usually near one of the corner flags or somewhere along the 18-yard box depending on which end of the field the action's trending toward that half. Low angle does two things: it makes the players look like the athletes they are instead of flattening them the way a shot from bleacher height does, and it gives you clean separation from the crowd or fence behind them.

I try to stay mobile rather than parking in one spot for the whole match. Soccer doesn't come to you — you have to read where the run of play is heading and get there before it does, which means a lot of walking the touchline with a camera up. By the end of a match I've usually covered a good chunk of the sideline's length, moving with the game instead of just standing at midfield hoping something happens in front of me.

What I'm actually watching for

The goal itself is the obvious moment, but honestly it's not the hardest one to get — everyone in the stadium knows it's coming the second the ball's in the box. The harder shots, and the ones I care more about, are the setup plays. A midfielder scanning the field before she plays the ball forward. A defender closing down a run at full speed. The keeper's hands the instant before contact on a save, not after. Corner kicks are their own thing entirely — I like being positioned so I can see the near post, because that's where the traffic and the contact usually happens, and it's more visually interesting than a clean, empty shot on frame.

I also watch the bench and the sideline reactions in between the run of play. Not every good photo from a match is a play on the ball. Some of the best ones are a player's face right after a missed chance, or the moment a substitute gets the signal to check in. Those shots don't happen if you're only watching the ball.

Since soccer's the sport I know from the inside — literally, from watching my sister grow up playing it — I've got a pretty specific sense of the rhythm of a match, when the game's about to open up and when it's going to stay tight in the midfield for another ten minutes. That's the part gear can't give you. The camera just has to be ready when I already know something's about to happen.