Creative portrait sessions for athletes in Ann Arbor — high school, college, and club. Not game-day action photos from the sidelines. Studio-grade lighting and real locations that show who you are, not just what you play.
Reserve a Session
Most sports photography happens from the sidelines — a long lens catching the game as it unfolds. That work has its place. This isn't it.
These are crafted portraits. You, your sport, and the intensity behind it, made with the same creative lighting and unhurried attention as any fine art session. The ball, the gear, the water, the ice — they belong in the frame, but they're never the point. The point is the person holding them.
A snapshot records that you were there. A portrait shows who you are.
Ann Arbor is an athlete's town, and this isn't only for graduating seniors.
Senior portraits that lead with your sport instead of treating it as a prop — or in-season images that capture the year you'll actually want to remember.
Michigan, Eastern, club and intramural. Portfolio images, recruiting and personal-brand portraits, or simply marking what you've poured years of early mornings into.
Masters swimmers, weekend racers, anyone whose sport is a real part of who they are — not a phase, a defining thing.
Serving athletes across Ann Arbor, Dexter, Saline, Brighton, Chelsea, and the surrounding Washtenaw County area.
Graduating senior? See how Senior & Graduation Portraits can lead with your sport.
Reserve a Session
If something else defines you — an instrument you've played since you were six, a craft you've quietly mastered, a discipline you've given years to — that's what I want to photograph. The athlete on this page could just as easily be a musician with a saxophone or a skater mid-spin.
Sports are the subject of this page. The real subject is always the person, and the thing they can't imagine living without.
See the idea behind A2 Portraits →Off-camera flash brings drama and dimension whether we shoot in a pool, on the ice, in a gym, or downtown. Lighting is the line between a portrait and a phone photo — and it travels.
The natatorium, the rink, the field, the court — or a clean studio look if that's the image in your head. We photograph where the sport means something, then light it like it matters.
Most photographers try to capture a pose. My passion is photographing the action. Sports are moving, and sports photography should make the viewer see the motion even though the photograph is perfectly still. That's the difference between a candid grabbed from the sideline and a crafted portrait built to hold the energy of the sport inside a single frame — and it's what I do as a sports photographer in Ann Arbor.
This isn't a hurried shoot where we race to five locations and burn through thirty poses. We create a few perfect images together — deliberately, as a collaboration.
We start on or near the surface your sport actually lives on: the court, the course, the track, the pool deck, the ice. From there, every image is built, not grabbed. I choose the lens for the scene, use filters to pull drama out of the sky, and balance natural light against off-camera flash until the exposure is rich, detailed, and exactly right.
Then we make it move. For some frames I'll ask you to recreate the real motion of your sport — the serve, the swing, the stroke, the takeoff — and use shutter speed and high-speed flash sync to shape it: motion blur that shows the speed, or a frozen instant that catches the compression of the ball against the strings. The technique serves the sport, not the other way around. You walk away with a small set of images worth printing and keeping — not a hard drive of near-misses.
Part of the craft is knowing that no two sports photograph the same way.
A tennis portrait plays the geometry — the painted lines, the net, the hard-court color under directional light. A golfer shot in the right hour of fairway light reads completely differently: open, wide, patient. A swimmer or water polo player lives and dies on how you handle water, reflection, and the surface of the pool. A runner on a track wants compression and speed; a hockey player on the ice wants cold, hard light that matches the game. A gymnast or dancer needs room for the body to extend into the frame. Whatever the sport, the approach is the same in spirit and different in execution: light it like it matters, and shoot it like the athlete is the point.
Recent athlete portraits — water polo and aquatics, with more on the way, including figure skating sessions this season.
If your sport — or whatever you're serious about — is a real part of who you are, let's make images that show it. Fill out the form and I'll be in touch within 24 hours.