Sugarland, Texas-based photographer Alison Carlino’s best advice for volume sports photography? “Grow slowly or you’re going to fail fast.” Each year, Carlino’s business, Carlino’s Photography, has a booking to photograph 600 Little Leaguers, which requires two stations and nine photography staff. It took a lot of trial and error over the last decade to build a workflow that could handle such an enormous number of diminutive baseball players.

Carlino had been a wedding and portrait photographer for 13 years when she started taking photographs for her son’s soccer team. “It’s not that I grew up playing sports,” says Carlino. She and her husband were both in the marching band in high school. “We didn’t really know a lot about any sport, to be honest.” But when she began making team photos, she leaned on the lighting and posing skills she already had. “It was traditional knee-in-the-grass work for the first couple of years,” she says. When digital composites became popular, she says, “we just took a hold of that and ran hard with it.” Those composites sustained her business through the COVID-19 pandemic and are still central to her volume packages.

Today Carlino’s Photography employs 14 people and photographs 125 sports teams, 30 seniors, 30 families, and five to seven weddings a year. At press time, Carlino was preparing to photograph 80 teams during the late summer of 2026. “It’s funny, if you would have asked me 10 years ago if I would have wanted that, I would have probably said no,” Carlino says. “But I couldn’t have done it alone. We were alone at that time. Now that I have 14, that’s a big difference in how you can scale up.”

VOLUME SPORTS WISDOM

Over the last decade, Carlino has learned valuable lessons in how to run a streamlined and profitable volume sports business:

Drop the bottom third. Carlino’s business provides team and individual portraits (or T&I, as she calls it) to schools on spec, hoping parents buy packages of photos. But because so much labor goes into those sessions, including post-production compositing for team photos and up to four employees to staff the session, she doesn’t return to schools where parents don’t make purchases. If a low- or no-producing school wants her to come back, she charges a $250 labor fee that the client must pay up front. “As you start scaling up, it’s important to know where your bottom third of producers are,” she says, “so you can drop those and just concentrate on the ones that are producing for your business.”

Additional products require a pre-commitment. Outside of T&I, Carlino’s Photography offers banners and media day packages, which require prepayment. For example, she recently spoke with a volleyball coach who, in addition to T&I, wanted individual headshots, banners for each senior player, and a large team banner to hang in the school gymnasium. Those additional products require a pre-commitment from the school, Carlino explains.

Strive for media days. Media days, where outlets secure on-camera interviews, videos, and still photography of athletes ahead of the season, began in the pro leagues and have trickled down to collegiate sports. Carlino’s media day for high school athletes tacks 90 minutes onto the standard T&I session for headshots and action photos, and portraits with effects like smoke, colored gels, and props. “Any sports photographer that’s not offering this, you are missing out on some really good stuff,” Carlino says. She markets these events only for senior or starter athletes, which usually encompasses 12 to 15 subjects. She caps the number of athletes at 20 and the school can buy additional time if they want to feature more athletes.

Work from the ground up. When Carlino first began doing media day sessions five years ago, she says, her workflow was not efficient. “Oh, we wasted so much time,” she adds, when, for example, she would capture a basketball player dunking the ball but then quickly need to move lights to photograph the player lying on the floor surrounded by basketballs. Today, she moves the athlete through poses from the ground up. “We start with tummy shots or on the back,” she explains. “Then we go to kneeling, and then we go to seated, and then we go to standing still, and then we go to action last. It’s from the floor up, so our lights stay low and then they go high.”

Set your lights and your workflow for action shots. Carlino finds it’s best to set the lights and then have each athlete move through the same motion one by one. For example, with volleyball players, she might have each of them do a bump and each of them do a spike. First, she sets up two lights for the bump shot, one pointed where each of them will be diving at the ball and one behind, “so it’s kind of a cross of light.” Once each of the athletes has gone through their bumps, she shifts the lights higher, and they each perform their spikes.

Coach your players for the best action shot. Don’t be afraid to advise your subjects on form if they’re not hitting it quite right, she says. “You have to tell them, ‘I want you to arch your back and really stretch your hands out, and I want you to make sure your mouth is closed and your tongue isn't hanging out. I want you to make sure you’re really over-exaggerating, so you look like a Sports Illustrated athlete going up and doing that.” Carlino advises photographers not to do media day action shots until they understand the sport well enough to know the proper form and technique, as well as which actions make for the best photographs.

Market your senior portrait work at your volume sports sessions. Cross-marketing at volume sports sessions is paramount for Carlino; it’s how she fills up her senior portrait calendar, which, besides media days, is what she loves most. At T&I sessions, she displays graduation cards, senior portrait albums, and metal prints. “We set them out on the table, and we advertise to those kids right there,” she says. “That is your priceless target market. You’re missing out if you’re not advertising to those kids, because they are starting their senior years.”

KNOW YOUR GEN Z CLIENTS

This generation of high school athletes cares about two things, she says: authenticity and content creation. With that in mind, Carlino is making some tweaks to her business for the new school year.

For one, she is launching a new athlete branding experience, an individual portrait session with a high school athlete on the field or in the gym. “They’re going to do the still images, the hero shots. They’re going to do the action stuff. That’s all going to stay the same,” she says. “What we’re adding is a recruitment-style branding experience where we’re going to have content creators come and make reels for these kids.” The experience is for high school athletes looking to build their brands as they move toward college sports, where they could potentially earn money through sponsorships.

Who is the content creator at those sessions? A close friend of the portrait subject who comes along on the photo session and creates content. After all, she explains, the senior portrait industry has had to evolve because Gen Z clients have different expectations than past students. “We have lost a good amount of senior portrait sessions this year to friends with cameras,” she says. These clients prefer the familiarity and trust of a friend creating content for them. So why not invite that person into the fold to create and post reels? It makes her subjects more comfortable, it gives Carlino access to another potential senior portrait client, and her portrait sessions are publicized through the shared reels, she says, calling it a win-win.

Carlino has found that current high schoolers are more likely to wait for a friend to post a photo of them and then share that post versus posting photos of themselves outright. So, where Carlino in the past has had a team of senior ambassadors help her with marketing, she is planning a new approach: a beach day photography experience in Galveston with 10 rising senior athletes on teams she’s photographed in the past. The students sign an agreement that Carlino can use the images on social media, and they get the digital images and all the content for free. She also plans to use the gathering as a kind of focus group. “I’ve got a list of questions I want to talk to them about,” she says, which she plans to do over ice cream. For example: Are you planning to do senior photos this year? What do you want out of that experience? What clothing styles are trending? “You can ask ChatGPT all day long what clothing styles are trending right now,” she notes, “but until a girl steps up and tells me that the big bow thing is something they really want to wear, it may not be trending in my area.”

Carlino says she is excited about switching up parts of her business, even giving away this free beach day session. “I’m 23 years into this business, she says, “and I’m still doing free stuff.” The true payment, she adds, is getting to know her target clients better.

Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.