Nikon Z9

Swedish sports photographer Joel Marklund has had an illustrious two-decade career as a photographer. Marklund shoots about every sport on the planet and is co-owner and chief photographer at Bildbyrån, Scandinavia’s premier sports photography agency.

From Child Athlete to Professional Sports Photographer

Marklund himself grew up playing sports, including hockey (much more on hockey soon). However, despite being an athlete growing up, Marklund did not initially pursue sports photography or photojournalism. He initially began his career in journalism as a writer.

“I actually started writing about video games at 16. I always had an interest in technology, but I started writing about games,” Marklund tells PetaPixel. “Then [I wrote about] entertainment, concerts, stuff like that.”

Marklund then got an internship as a photographer at a local newspaper in northern Sweden.

“It was not like I had a big interest in photography when I was a kid, but something sparked in me when I was around 17 or 18,” the award-winning photographer says. However, he admits that he has always had an interest in visuals, and on his mother’s side of the family, there was a famous painter. Still, nobody in his immediate family had anything to do with the arts or journalism.

“So when I was doing this internship, I found out about sports photography — because a local paper needs you to shoot everything. One day you could shoot five different things, including maybe sports,” Marklund recalls. “I quickly realized I was very good at it, positioning myself well and capturing that one defining moment.”

Two years later, he had moved to the biggest newspaper in Sweden, and just a few months after that, I got hired by Bildbyrån,” Marklund says.

He started there in 2007, and in 2012, he and some of his colleagues purchased the company; they’re still partners there now.

“So since 2007, I’ve been primarily focused on sports coverage and been doing that full-time ever since.”

Marklund admits that he has always been competitive, dating back to his days playing sports as a kid. That competitive nature persists to this day — photography is a hyper-competitive field.

“It’s thrilling to compete with other photographers,” Marklund says. He and his colleagues at Bildbyrån are always trying to be the ones to get the shot, the one that graces the world’s biggest newspapers and websites. Being successful in sports photography means not only capturing a fantastic shot, but also getting it over the wire as quickly as possible.

Creativity in Sports Photography: Remote Nikon Cameras

One way to achieve success and capture the biggest shot from the world’s most significant sports events is to be creative and get a shot that nobody else can. This is demonstrated very well by Marklund’s recent work at the International Ice Hockey Federation’s (IIHF) recent World Championship co-hosted by Sweden and Denmark. The 16-team tournament lasted two weeks in May, and Marklund and Bildbyrån were dedicated to ensuring that they got the best photos. They were on their home ice, after all.

This was the first time Sweden had hosted the World Championships since 2013, so it was crucial to make the most of the opportunity. For Sweden’s part, they hosted games at the renovated Avicii Arena (formerly known as Stockholm Globe Arena) in Stockholm, which only reopened earlier this year.

“We really wanted to do something different. It’s home turf,” Marklund says. “You want to deliver the best at every event we go to internationally, but when it’s home, you want to show everyone else that we are creating something different.”

Marklund began planning their coverage two years ago. But the fact that the arena renovations weren’t complete was a major hurdle.

“We only had a few months to actually work inside the arena before the event,” the photographer explains. 

”Of course, you could look at blueprints, but it was really, really hard to plan because they were late building it and they didn’t have the technology in place they would normally have until several weeks before [puck drop].”

Event organizers were about to pull the plug on Marklund and Bildbyrån using robotic cameras at all. 
”We were told ‘No, sorry, we can’t do it.’”

However, Marklund and others had been working on these plans for years. Ultimately, they were able to get the system ready, but it came down to the wire. Typically, organizers handle expenses for things like this, but in this case, Bildbyrån had to foot the bill to ensure everything was ready in time for the games inside the arena.

The dedication and hard work paid off, and ultimately, because plans had to be adjusted on the fly, Marklund and his team set up cameras in some spots they hadn’t originally planned on, including right below the Jumbotron at center ice.

“It turns out that the position is very much like playing a video game,” Marklund says. The remote controller for the cameras is a PlayStation 5 Dualsense controller, by the way, so the camera positions not only mimic an NHL video game, but controlling them is the same, too.

“It’s really like playing a video game when you sit there in the stands and control [the camera],” Marklund says. “We got a lot of angles out of it,” including some that have never been seen before for ice hockey photography.

Marklund says that the level of control possible with the robotic cameras makes it similar to shooting handheld. The camera response is essential in real-time, and the controller’s joysticks offer fine-tuned control over the cameras, delivering around 300 degrees of rotational coverage. Marklund also pre-programmed specific shot angles to make it easier to nail shots near the net, and the team had a fisheye lens positioned directly over center ice.

The robotic heads are made by Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC), a company Nikon acquired in 2016.

The setup comprised multiple Nikon Z9 cameras and Nikon 24-120mm f/4 lenses. As for why a 24-120mm f/4 rather than a 24-70mm f/2.8 or 70-200mm f/2.8, Marklund wanted to use something that covered the wide and mid-telephoto end, and f/4 was not a limitation given the arena’s excellent lighting setup and the Z9’s capabilities.

Marklund calls the remote camera setup a “very good case study” for future implementations, including at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy.

Bildbyrån is still in negotiations about where exactly they’ll be able to set up in Milan. The Olympics are a huge deal, so there are many more organizational hoops to jump through, and space must be shared among numerous broadcasters and organizers.

Marklund is feeling positive that they’ll score a nice spot for shooting ice hockey at Milan’s new PalaItalia arena and the existing Milan Ice Park, which will also be used for ice hockey. The 2026 Winter Olympics will mark the long-awaited return of NHL players to the ice hockey tournament, so it will be a true best-on-best tournament.

Sports Photography on a Global Stage: How Marklund and Bildbyrån Stand Out

While Marklund is always thrilled to be the one to capture the best shot himself, he has grown to appreciate the success when anyone on their team gets the win.

“That’s my main objective, that we as a team get out of an event with the best shots,” he says. “I have no problem if one of my staffers walks away with the 10 best shots and I don’t have any because I still feel my part of having done the planning and seeing the planning being executed.”

While the precise way a sporting event occurs can seem random and chaotic, there is still a lot of preparation that photographers like Marklund can do to give themselves the best chance at success. While no sports photographer knows exactly what will happen, they can minimize the risk of walking away with nothing by conducting thorough research and selecting the best spots. It’s kind of like making your own luck, Marklund agrees.

Having been a sports photographer for 20 years, Marklund has witnessed significant technological evolution. Cameras have gotten smaller and faster, lenses have gotten better and more versatile, and communications and robotics technologies have improved by leaps and bounds.

While faster and better cameras are great and make it easier to capture amazing photos, Marklund thinks that improved wireless networking in the past few years has been extremely important for sports photojournalism. This is especially true for Bildbyrån, which shoots everything in RAW format to achieve the best possible image quality.

That said, Marklund notes that the lack of blackout in the viewfinder on the latest mirrorless cameras is significant, as is the improvement in autofocus technologies. Even though the Z9 is incredible, he says he cannot wait to see what comes next, not only with the cameras themselves, but also robotics technologies.

He also credits Bildbyrån’s relatively small size as a key factor in the team’s success. While the huge players in the space, such as Getty and the Associated Press, have many more photographers and a lot more money to spend on the latest technology, Bildbyrån, which Marklund describes as a “mid-sized agency,” has to work smartly and creatively.

“When you don’t always have access to the best positions and the latest and most expensive technology, you need to think differently. You need to be creative and think smarter. I think it is a good thing,” Marklund says.

The robotic setup at the IIHF World Championships is a great example of that. I’ve seen a lot of hockey photography over the years, and I’ve never seen any shots quite like the ones that Marklund and the rest of the Bildbyrån team captured in May in Stockholm.

Through Marklund’s portfolio, creativity is on full display. He routinely captures amazing sports moments with distinct, unique angles and compositions.

While he says he nearly always needs to focus on getting the shots a client wants, the times when he can be more creative and try new things are the most exciting as a photographer.

“To be honest, there are so many people who can shoot [the standard shots],” Marklund says, “But not many that really look outside the box and capture something different.”

While he admits that the more creative shots are not always the ones that end up being the most published, they are the ones that keep him going as an artist — the ones he puts his “heart” into capturing. He says photographers need to have ways to be creative to keep their energy up.

He admits there have been times he’s grown tired of sports photography, and he has needed to reset each time to get back into the flow. COVID provided one of those opportunities a few years ago, when many of the world’s sports leagues shut down. He shifted back into traditional photojournalism, photographing the impact of the pandemic in New York in 2020 and then the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

“It’s good now and then to have some kind of break or do something different because a lot of the time, you are repeating yourself,” Marklund says.

Since experiencing that reset as a photographer, Marklund has been on a creative tear in sports photography. His photos from last year’s Paris Olympics are incredible examples of what can happen when a talented, experienced sports photographer gets the runway to be creative and experiment with new techniques and artistic choices.

He’s looking forward to bringing that same spirit of ingenuity to Milano Cortina early next year — a massive endeavor that has been in the works for years already. Marklund will be shooting skiing and hockey events, while the rest of the team executes the plans he has developed for the remaining events. Given the dispersed nature of the Milano Cortina Winter Games, it will be tougher than usual for individual photographers to shoot multiple events consecutively. It will be a huge logistical lift, but one that Marklund and Bildbyrån is ready for.

As for now, Marklund is in Wimbledon, and sports fans can follow along with his work on Bildbyrån and his Instagram.

Image credits: Joel Marklund, Bildbyrån