Image via Google

The smell of popcorn, hot dogs, and fresh-cut grass can only mean one thing: today is opening day, and it’s awesome. For those of us who are baseball fanatics, today is our own national holiday. It marks the beginning of a 6-month long emotional roller coaster ride that is sure to bring out the 9-year old baseball card-collecting kid in all of us. But, you don’t have to be a baseball fan to appreciate this day, much like you do not need to be a photographer to appreciate photography. In fact, baseball and photography have a lot more in common than you would imagine.

Train your eye with a framing card

How is baseball and photography anything alike? Well for one, you need a good eye. In baseball, you need to see the pitch before you can hit it. Players train their eyes to differentiate between a slow curveball, and a blazing fastball. In photography, your eyes also need to be trained. A great tip many photographers share is the fact that you need to see the image before you can capture it. How do you do that? A great training exercise, endorsed countless times by Marc Silber, is to use a framing card. By using a framing card (right), you learn to see what your camera sees. The best way to do this is to go out without any camera gear, take the card and simply look around. You will train your eye to determine what will fit in a shot and how to see the world differently.

Baseball and photography don’t just have similarities, they go hand-in-hand. For nearly two centuries, baseball has continually evolved from a child’s game to being a part of American culture. Fortunately for all of us, photography has been around for just as long; documenting every bit of it. Think about the triumphs our nation has gone through with Jackie Robinson breaking racial barriers and how its immortal moment has been captured through photography. What about those larger than life American heroes like Babe Ruth and Willie Mays; photography has managed to capture all of those moments and personalities as well. Without photography those moments would be a mythical memory, and without baseball, well… that would just be plain un-American.

So whether you’re capturing an image of your favorite player hustling down the first base line or commemorating the festivities of an American; happy opening day. Play ball!

Be inspired, shoot, and share.