Long Lens, High Energy: Capturing the Sierra Vista Skatepark Contest

Mar 09, 2026

At about 1:45pm on Sunday I saw that there was a skateboard contest at our local park. I didn’t have any plans, so I grabbed my camera and headed over there.

I went from a day where I didn’t plan on taking any pictures, to having almost 1500 images on an SD card by the evening. I ended up editing about 150 images and plan to share a couple dozen or so in this post.

When I used to take skateboard pictures of my son, I almost always used a wide lens from a low angle. But since I didn’t know these kids (or if I was even going into the skate park itself), I just left the Sigma 150-600mm on the camera. I did still get some action shots, but the longer lens also allowed me to focus a bit on the skate crew and the crowd.

I had the aperture at F8 the whole time, so not always a lot of background blur (especially when I was at 150mm). But it sometimes paid off. For instance, I don’t even mind that the skater who wiped out wasn’t in focus here; the reaction of his buddies was the better visual story anyway.

If you know me, you know I like to take pictures of other people taking pictures.

Pretty sure this girls had the best seat in the house to catch the action.

As I said, getting “action” shots with the long lens was a bit different than what I was used to during previous skateboarding shoots. But I got a few I liked.

And then there were a couple of cool shadow shots (wish I’d gotten more)

Skate kids don’t always have the best reputation, but I remember from when my son was into it, that’s usually not deserved. This was a competition, but you could tell they were all friends and sportsmanship was front and center.

In the end, it looked like everyone, including the judges had a really good time.

Now that I’ve gotten a taste of this again, I think I may have to put the wide angle lens on my camera and got back over to the park one of these afternoons to see if I can get to know any of these skaters and maybe get some better action shots for another future post.

I made an album with the rest of the pictures: