CRITICAL PHOTOJOURNALISM

Steph Chambers is an award-winning staff photographer with Getty Images based in Seattle, Wash. where she covers Pacific Northwest professional sports. Chambers has covered the Olympic games in Tokyo, the Paralympic games in Beijing, and World Athletics in Eugene and in Budapest. Pittsburgh-raised, she moved back to the area for work after completing her B.S. in journalism from Missouri State University, where she was recruited to compete in Division-I field hockey. Sports culture is her passion and is a driving force in her work. Chambers was a member of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for its coverage of the Tree of Life synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh. She was also the first female to win Sports Photographer of the Year for the Pictures of the Year International (77th) competition. She lives outside Seattle with her husband Keven and their Australian cattle dog Hoagie.

The interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

I've always been interested in sports. I played sports in high school, was really involved with photographing sports, and would go to as many games as possible. A lot of my friends played on our high school sports teams. It was a fun way to be included. While looking for colleges, I didn't know if I wanted to do film or photography. I knew I wanted to do something in the media, but looking at the price tags of some of the schools, I was encouraged to try to get a scholarship through sports. So I ended up playing field hockey in college. I had a full ride, and I did not have any student loans. I ended up settling on journalism while I was in college (Missouri State). It was the most affordable school where I could get a full-ride. I chose it based on money. I don't know if that altered some of my connections that a lot of students receive when they go to Missouri or Syracuse, but honestly, it made me work even harder. 

I remember one of my journalism teachers our first year asked everyone in the class how many of us worked for the student newspaper. I and one other girl raised our hands, and she was like, “How do you all expect to get a job if you don't even work for your student newspaper?” I remember that moment thinking that I had to really work hard to even hope to get a job because it's so competitive. I interned every single summer that I could—the Pittsburgh Zoo, the Anchorage (AK) Daily News, the Kalamazoo (MI) Gazette, and then the Tribune Review (PA), which ended up being my first job out of college. And that job paved the way for a job at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette where I worked for three and a half years. While I was there, I covered a lot of everything. Two colleagues were only focused on sports. Others mostly focused on projects, or had their own favorite thing that they like to cover. I pretty much did everything, and that included video, as well.

They're encouraging us to do more video at Getty, except the thing with professional sports is there's a lot of contract issues so you can't necessarily make videos on the field of anything you want. It's becoming part of our role, though. We're not able to record during games, because usually a company, like Fox, will have all the rights for video for that game. It makes it easier because you only have to focus on still photos while you're at a game. But in regards to Getty wanting us to do more video—that would be more along the lines of photographing scene setters outside the stadium, for example.

As for what a typical week looks like for Getty, it really comes in waves. So, for example, summertime seems to be when all the bigger events happen. Because I am based in the Pacific Northwest, I was invited to be a part of the World Athletics championships pool, which is the major track event other than the Olympics. It was hosted in Eugene Oregon, and leading up to that event I did a lot of track events to prepare for that. Eugene is known as the headquarters of Nike, and they built this state of the art track as a part of University of Oregon, so a lot of premiere track events come through the U.S. The track trials before the Olympics come here, too. So that’s only 4.5 hours travel for me, but since Seattle's got a lot going on, I'm mostly based here. I have also shot the paralympics in Beijing. The photo editors will look at the schedule and see if it's a slow month—maybe just regular season Mariners games, and nothing else happening. That's a good time to send somebody like me to a major event like the World Athletics.

I would say team sports are my favorite. More than golf or static sports like that. But I’ve never been to a fight and that's on my bucket list. I think football would be my number one because I'm from Pittsburgh. It was such a huge part of the culture. It's very blue collar, and I just gravitate toward the showmanship of it—the pageantry. It's all about representing your town, and I think that's a part of me, so I love that. And I love hockey. Also, growing up in Pittsburgh, hockey is huge, but unfortunately it's a really hard sport to photograph. There's advertisements everywhere and the goals can look really ugly. You're limited to photographing through this little photo hole, and you just kind of pivot around in this one small space. It's very difficult. Maybe I'm more of a hockey fan than a hockey photographer? But I enjoy going to the games because it's so fast, and I grew up playing and watching it. 

For football, I love using the 400 mm, f2.8 lens. I know a lot of people use a 200mm-400mm zoom, but I feel like the zooming can distract me and it's not as clean. I just think things get lost and muddy with that lens. I carry way too much gear. I'm five feet tall, and people always make comments. But I love having the 400mm (lens) on one body, a 70-200mm (lens) for end zone action, and then I keep a wide angle (lens) on me, as well, a 24mm-70mm zoom (lens), in case somebody reacts right in front of me. I would hate to miss that. I know that's a lot to carry, but I prefer to have too much rather than not get something I really wanted. I use Canon. I have the 1DX Mark IIIs. A lot of my colleagues are using Canon mirrorless bodies now. I think I’m the only one who isn’t. 

For transmitting, we have MiFis (wireless transmitters). I plug an ethernet cable into it and also plug it into my camera body, as well. The only thing that's a little frustrating is—let’s say I'm photographing the quarterback with my 400mm. He drops back and I switch quickly to a 70-200mm to get the catch in the end zone. Then I have frames from the play on both cameras, so I have to plug it into each body to send the images. But yes, we send through ethernet cables with a MiFi, and the photos go into a server, and on the back end an editor is waiting for them. They select, crop and tone and caption them, and then put them up on the Getty website within a few minutes of receiving them. It's pretty amazing how quickly the workflow goes. I carry the MiFi in my belt bag. So it's pretty great technology. With major events, we'll have hard line ethernet cables plugged directly into a wall or something. You can use them wirelessly, but I think they're more successful using the Ethernet cable.

We use voice tags to add information to our images. (The cameras have an option for a photographer to press a button on the back of the camera and make an audio recording which the camera attaches to the image. The photo editor receives the image with the audio file attached back in the office when it is transmitted using the MiFi.) So let’s say a touchdown happens or it's a picture that's harder to know what exactly is going on—like a catch. They don't know if the catch is a touchdown, or why it is significant. I would record a voice tag for the photo saying something like, “Number 20 catches a pass for a first down etc…” All we really need to note is the numbers on their jerseys, because when I'm covering a game, I'm running around. I can't be huffing and puffing and breathing into a little microphone and giving a whole play by play. You're watching the game as an editor too. I do take a picture of the scoreboard when the quarter changes to help me stay aware of what I am working on. Another thing we use voice tags for is if the photographer wants a certain crop. That helps the editor know what the photographer was envisioning with their image.

I would say maybe the biggest difference between photographing for a newspaper and a wire service is that at Getty, we have a lot of commercial deals with different leagues, so we are expected to get a lot of the game action and static images like a player holding a bat or a ball, using their glove, wearing a different jersey on a different day. It can get really tedious. Our images are used on a lot of trading cards and we're partners with MLB, so they use them for a lot of things. For us they might be boring pictures, but those photos are used and they sell. So, I think the hardest part of the job is doing that stock stuff. What I personally love to do is capturing the light and the mood of the game—the fans, the atmosphere. I love that stuff. And we're encouraged to look for what's new, and to make our images stand apart from our competitors. So when I do cover a game, I try to balance the stock work with what I love doing. Football is a little easier than some of the other sports because you can roam around a little bit. You photograph the first drive of the game, get the quarterback and those trading card pictures because we need those basically the first drive of the game, and then after that I'm like, “Alright, now I can be creative and go have fun.”

I think someone that does that exceptionally well is my co-worker, Patrick Smith. He is by far my favorite photographer. He sees so differently than everyone. He just knows when to step far away and see the game. He’s not always in your face with a fisheye. He uses color, the light, the graphics. He can also play on humor. I think that's really hard to do. At World Athletics this year, he was leading our team and during one of the races, there was a cameraman who accidentally was on the home straight during one of the longer races. Patrick had this great frame of it. These runners were trying to navigate around this guy, and it was such a shock. The way he frames things can be shocking and hilarious at the same time. He's had a few like that. I remember there's this photo he had from Nascar of a bird soaring and the bird was in focus, and you can see the car in the background. He sees those little details that just transcend the event.

What's neat about my job is that I am exposed to all sorts of new sports. And when I travel internationally there are so many that are different from North American sports. And during the Paralympics, I was assigned sled hockey and wheelchair curling. At Getty, we do have specific teams that are tailored for those more difficult specific sports. We have an aquatics team, which would be the swimming races, but also the beautiful synchronized swimming and diving. I hope to be a part of the track team eventually. But it takes a little while to get enough experience to do something like that.

To be honest, I never thought I would be here. To that regard, my advice would be to never discount any assignment you're given, because one moment, I was covering high school sports for a local paper and now I'm sent to the Olympics for one of the biggest wire services in the world. I sometimes think, “How did I do that?” But, I really truly believe, if you treat every assignment, even a high school football game, like it's the Super Bowl, then you learn and grow from every assignment, because you aren’t blowing it off. Don’t think, “Oh, I'm stuck at this crappy assignment.” I hate it when people say that because I love photographers that can make the most of anything. I think that shows a lot of your skill and your personality. No one wants to work with someone that looks down upon assignments, or others who cover those sorts of things. That'd be my biggest piece of advice is to never discount anything, because you have no idea where it can lead you and what you can learn from it. I certainly learned a lot from working in newspapers photographing buildings. Some of the assignments were not glamorous or maybe they aren’t going to change the world. So be humble, have humility and treat everyone with respect is my advice. You just never know. The world is so small and there's a lot of opportunity.

Something I'm learning from my colleagues is you're going to have to accept that you are gonig to miss stuff. When I'm in the zone, whether playing sports or work, I can get really competitive with myself, and I’m really hard on myself. I need to cut it out because no one wants to be around someone who is moping around and beating themselves up—talking about the past. You can't change the past. It's already in your memory card. Think about what's happening next to you. I think that is just a practice that will always be a part of this job, and a lot of it is also a life skill that has nothing to do with photography. It’s learning how to bounce back from anything. 

We have a lot of team events where we work with our colleagues. You can’t drag down the team. I've missed a few things in my corner of the end zone, and it ate me alive for an entire weekend and into the following week. That is an area I really need to grow in. I have heard that it comes with maturity and experience, but also—let’s be real—it's not like we're curing cancer. We're taking pictures! So, let it roll off your back. I care a lot about other people and I care a lot about my colleagues. Watching how I react can either positively or negatively affect the team and it's really important to be aware of that. Isn't it sad to think about going your whole lifetime thinking about pictures you missed? I think that it's just not talked about enough in our industry.