A SPORTS MEDIA INTERNSHIP
Louise Anderbjörk
Dear Readers,
As spring is quickly arriving, you may have started thinking ahead for the summer, maybe hoping to find some good job opportunities within photography and media. If this is you, I wanted to share my experience from last summer, when I worked as a Marketing and Communications intern for the University of St Andrews’s Sport Department - Saints Sport.
Going into the role with limited knowledge of sports marketing, the 6 weeks I spent at Saints Sport turned out to be a fun learning curve that also helped me rediscover my interest in sports photography, which is what first got me into photography over 10 years ago. As an intern, my main objective was to update their media bank by photographing my way through the entire catalogue of Saint Sport’s summer activities.
Because of the hybrid nature of my position, I had a lot of flexibility in how I went about completing these tasks, and so my day-to-day working schedule would vary a lot. Usually, I would spend about 2-3 days in the office, and the rest either out shooting various sports or in a coffee shop editing. As someone who loves both coffee and the thrill of photographing sport up-close, this was ideal.
Out of the 10 000 promotional photos I ended up producing for the media bank, the majority was of Saint Sports’s extensive programme of in-house community classes, which ranged from group fitness, to personal training sessions, to various Junior Saints children’s classes. I loved getting the opportunity to meet and work with so many different people and age groups, and especially the Junior Saint classes was such a fun time, as no class was ever the other one alike.
There was a different sport to cover every day, which was an exciting challenge as a photographer - having to quickly learn the rules and movements of new sports to figure out the best angles for a good photo. These were also the classes where I had to learn the skill of properly immersing myself into the environment I was photographing. Sometimes that meant shooting from the top of a climbing wall, or at the centre of a 3-5 year olds tennis game with tennis balls (fortunately the soft ones) raining down around you. Either way, it created some very fun and memorable moments that showed how photography will never cease to engage you.
Just as memorable were the experiences I had photographing professional sports during my internship. The first taste I got of it was when I was asked to photograph the international Boyd Quaich Golf Tournament on the St Andrews Old Course. It was a three-day competition with 7am starts at the tee off each day, but the early start was so worth it considering all the fun I had shooting golf for the first time, and that on the prestigious Old Course too. The technical challenges of photographing prosport were very new to me, and I quickly realised the need to adjust my settings and composition to match the unprecedented level of speed and precision in a professional’s execution of their sport.
It was a fun challenge to take on, and I was lucky to get more practice at it, working with 9 professional sport teams from around the UK that came to train at the Saints Sport facilities - including Scotland Rugby and Burnley F.C. It was great to see how, with time and practice, I began to understand sports I previously knew little of and, as a result, could start to spot and capture those perfect action shots. I finished my 6-weeks at Saints Sport with a portfolio of photos I never thought I could have taken as I began my internship, and with a renewed interest in continuing down the route of sport photography. So, if you are thinking of applying to an internship that is slightly out of your comfort zone as a photographer - do it! I think you will be amazed at what you will learn and the new passions you will develop.
This article first appeared in PRISMA, Issue 14.