Always a winner: Athlete Photos by Jack Hutch
Jack Hutch has spent decades shooting athlete photos of everyone from Jerry Rice to Spud Webb, Kristi Yamaguchi to Joe Montana and hundreds more, so he doesn’t get nervous around high profile personalities anymore. But he still gets a thrill. “Sports photography is just one of the most exciting things to shoot. You’ve got these bodies at their best, doing things they’ve perfected – If you bring your best, you’re going to get something great,” he says.
To bring his best, Jack prepares often and early. “Never once in my career has any athlete given me the amount of time I was promised by the agent. If they tell me ‘an hour,’ I think ‘12 minutes.’ Jack heads to set hours before the athlete arrives and sets up multiple shots, various lighting, wardrobe changes and props. “So when the athlete gets there it’s just bam-bam-bam, switch, bam-bam-bam…and we got it.”
This training has served him well with another time-pressed population he’s often called to photograph – Silicon Valley CEOs. But with subjects who aren’t as accustomed to being in front of the camera, he sometimes has to slow down.
“Very accomplished athletes who aren’t super famous may not be as comfortable,” says Jack. “But they all know how to get in the zone. I lay a scene for them: ‘You’re in the semi-finals of the Olympic trials. You walk up to the blocks, you get prepared.’ Immediately, they’re in it.’ Then it’s up to me. Do I want to go low to show the clothing movement as they take off from the blocks? Or from up high, looking down on the lines of the track for a graphic look as they stretch?”
Jack also considers the exact way their bodies will move as he shoots, taking into account which hand might come up first, which hip is coming around or what the follow through looks like. He times his lighting against all these variables to get the shot he wants.
“Being an athlete and shooting athletics works together,” says Jack. “You can get the essence of the shot because you understand it.” Jack grew up playing a wide range of sports, starting with ice hockey and evolving to include golf, quarterback of his football team, and butterfly swimming and hockey at the college level. He still plays sports when he can and coaches his son’s hockey team. “When you know how the body works, how the action works, you can get the shot.”
What he can’t always control is the restrictions on the athlete. “Everyone gets approval now,” Jack says. “The athlete is under contract, so the sponsor, the agent, the PR firm – they all have rules about what the athlete can’t do. It can get really limiting. But I like a challenge,” he laughs.
That challenge forces him to continually think outside the box, reinventing athlete portraiture when necessary. A portrait of Willie Mays, for instance, became a black and white shot of just Willie’s hands holding the ball. “With these one-of-a-kind athletes you have a chance to create something that will speak to their legacy. Those old, beaten up hands - that’s the history of baseball right there.”
In addition to athlete photos, Jack has also amassed an impressive body of work in lifestyle, industry and architecture photography. Based in San Francisco, he shoots both locally and on location from his fully-equipped Mobile Studio. You can see more of Jack’s work here.
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