One Of the BEST Sports Photography Books: SLIDE SHOW

How many you out there have ever shot with slide film? I know when I was just starting out at 13 I never ran a roll of slide film through my camera.

One I had no idea what I would need slides for and two I was afraid that “it didn’t have as much give” as film did.

Of course over time and as I became more educated about slides I understood their importance. The colors were better than film, the slides held up better over time and the overall quality was just superior. I also found out that most pro sports photographers were only shooting chrome.

Slides were not something that you would generally turn into prints. That meant they lived as they were and normally did not get cropped. What you saw is what you got and you really lived with it.

When I cam across the photo book called “Slide Show from Sports Illustrated” I was truly amazed at the moments captured. What I love about this book is you get to see the original slide and mount. You can read all of the information that editors over the years have written. You have your X numbers, dates, dots and so much more. All of these things have their own special meaning and that is explained in the book.

I was fascinated to find out that so many of the images were cropped and cropped heavily. In sports photography that seems to be something that is the norm. There is nothing wrong with it, let me repeat just because I don’t personally crop my work doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with cropping. If the image is still good enough for the cover of Sports Illustrated it’s still good enough for me.

I love the details and the stories that are told with the slides. This is one of my favorite books in my collection. Not only do I love sports but when you combine sports and photography you can’t go wrong.

Here is an excerpt borrowed form Amazon’s listing of the book. If you would like to order one for yourself you can check it out on AMAZON right here.

“If every picture tells a story, every slide tells an even deeper one. Tucked away in Sports Illustrated`s photo archive sits 50 years worth of film, a frame-by-frame depiction of the history of sports over the last half a century. The stickers and scribbles along a single slide`s border are like tags on a streamer trunk, telling the story of that photo`s journey from the playing field to the magazine. This book selects the most colorful of these slides and presents the mounts as objects of art in an oversized 176-page collection, complete with behind-the-scenes vignettes of how the shots came to be. Some slides capture classic SI cover images (Dwight Clark`s catch in the 1982 NFC Championship Game or Brandi Chastain ripping her shirt off at the 1999 World Cup) while others are simply great photos (Pete Rose running at full speed or Joe Namath lounging poolside before Super Bowl III). The images themselves are iconic, but by seeing them as slides you get that extra step back. You can see the history that has been made from these flashes of an instant.”