Sports photography is an engaging genre that encapsulates the enthralling feeling of watching sports. A perfectly snapped photo can capture the wave of emotions of winning and losing or the grit in the eyes of an athlete. However, sports—like everything else—was thrown into uncertainty two years ago. As a result, sports photographers had to change the way they capture sports and explore new opportunities to channel their creativity.

Taiwan-based sports photographer Billy Dai is one of them. Since the world of sports changed, he had to think outside the box.

“Photographing athletes on the field is a fundamental part of sports photography. However, since there were fewer physical sporting events in 2020 and 2021, I paid particular attention to the symbolic links between the field and the sidelines, and how that was a microcosm of the pandemic,” said Billy. “This includes athletes wearing masks on the bench, sports arenas without spectators, spectator stands with spectators seated apart, or the various measures taken to prevent the pandemic. I believe these are the images that best captured that collective global moment in time.”

Over the past couple of years, he was propelled to venture into different projects to keep his passion for photography alive. He then looked inside his home from a new perspective and documented his pregnant wife and their baby.

In many cases, keeping the passion aflame also meant staying creative. Here are some lessons from our conversation with Billy Dai on how to keep the creative juices flowing amid adversity.

1. Find your inspiration

Inspiration is the first step to staying creative. Many content creators are inspired by other creators they look up to, others are inspired by the wonderful things they see around them. For Billy, his inspiration to venture into a new creative field came from his home.

In April to June 2021, most organisations in Taiwan had to transition to remote working. At the time, his wife was pregnant with their second child, and he had to stay home as much as possible to avoid risks to her and their unborn child. With nothing else to do, he picked up his camera again to document his wife’s pregnancy and their baby.

2. Experiment with new creative outlets

If you’re feeling out of balance or unsatisfied, you might need to explore new creative outlets, like experimenting with new genres of photography or new creative activities.

For example, the documentation project of Billy’s family includes both photos and videos. While not new to recording on film, Billy admitted that he still had a lot to learn. He wanted to explore this craft more deeply and be able to document great films. To practice, he chose to take more videos of his family rather than photos. Switching to the video function more frequently has motivated him to pursue this route, and ultimately learn the dos and don’ts of film recording.

3. Capture the bigger picture

Before the lockdowns, Billy had already started a project called “Women in Sports,” which he worked on during his spare time outside work. The initial concept was to spotlight women athletes. However, he soon realised that the industry is bigger than just the players, so he expanded the scope to include women from other areas of sports as well, especially due to the stoppage on competitions.

“The subjects are the women from all around me who are in the sports industry. They were athletes, ball girls, journalists, marketers, or anyone inside the industry. However, since there were no tournaments, there were no images of them on the sidelines,” Billy explained. “Instead, I collaborated with them by making them the subjects of portraits. This project is ongoing and aims to highlight their daily routines in a way that is compositionally interesting and in contrast to their work in the sports industry.”

4. Keep your goal in mind

Why do you want to stay creative? What do you aim for? We learned from Billy that it is also important to let your goal motivate you to push forward even in the face of challenges. For him, his goal to participate in major international sports events is what keeps him going.

“As a sports photographer, I aim to attend major international competitions in the near future. At this stage, I would love to participate in the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou and the World University Games in Chengdu. With the hassles of quarantine and security checks at various tournaments, the lightweight and compact size of Sony cameras will reduce the load on photographers moving from venue to venue. This allows us to focus better on observing the matches,” he said.

Billy believes that challenges are there to keep us going. He believes that, after the profound changes of the last two years, the documentation that photographers do is even more significant in telling the stories—sporting or otherwise—that matter to our communities.

“A photographer's job is to record what he or she sees around him or her. The more challenging the situation, the more we need to pick up our cameras and capture the moments. Perhaps one day, decades from now, images like those of a crowd of masked spectators will be looked at as definitive of the times we lived in,” said Billy.