I’m a motion designer. I think in frames, keyframes, and pacing, it’s just how my brain is wired after years of staring at timelines and I have a lot of respect for people who do this well and for the time it actually takes to get there. These five are the action sports creators whose work I keep coming back to.
Action sports photography and filmmaking is a different discipline. You’re chasing athletes who are moving fast, in conditions that aren’t controlled, in terrain that’s trying to kill everyone involved. The window for the shot is often a fraction of a second. Getting it right once takes skill. Getting it right consistently, that’s a craft.
Here are the five action sports photographers and filmmakers who made me want to pick up a camera.
At a glance
· Spenny (@gimbalgod) – proves the camera matters less than the operator, his iPhone footage is as cinematic as his Red camera work
· Jacob Wagler (@jacob.wagler) – color correction skills that make me feel inadequate
· Scott Secco (@scott_secco) – shoots MTB with a restraint and intention that most action sports creators need to study from him
· Paddy Cartwright (@paddy.cartwright) – shows what high-energy editing actually sounds like when the sound design is done properly
· Blake Pickup (@blakepickup) – one of us, he does the sports he shoots, and it shows in every frame
Spenny – The Operator Who Proved the Camera Isn’t the Variable
@gimbalgod – That’s the handle, and it’s earned.
I found Spenny through pro snowboarder Ståle Sandbech. If you follow serious snowboard content, you’ve seen Ståle and if you’ve watched the footage around him closely, you’ve noticed a consistent ultra close-up shots, wild transitions and always a good song. Spenny is behind a lot of that.
Spenny has launched an academy in collaboration with GoPro to share the secrets behind his cinematic style. He covers the entire workflow from A to Z, it’s a must if you want to move past basic clips and start creating professional-grade content with your GoPro.
GIMBALGOD x GOPRO ACADEMY
He was sponsored by GoPro and published his settings for action sports work. GoPro reached 50 million cameras sold in 2024 (GoPro Investor Relations, 2024). A lot of that adoption is driven by creators like Spenny showing people what those cameras can actually do in the right hands. I’ve used his settings personally for snowboard and dirt bike footage, and they hold up. That kind of practical generosity is rare.
The detail that changes everything, Spenny is actually a skilled snowboarder. He’s not filming from the sideline. He’s right there on the jumps and deep in the backcountry with the pros, riding alongside them to get the shot. That proximity rewrites the footage entirely, the angles, the energy, the split-second decisions about where to be. You can’t replicate that from outside the sport.
He’s also a massive personality. You follow him for the work and stay for the person.
What you learn from following him
The camera is not the variable. The operator is. Technique, timing, and an understanding of light will outperform better gear every single time.
Jacob Wagler – The Edit Is as Important as the Shot
@jacob.wagler – I found Jacob through snowmobile photography, and I have not stopped following him since.
I’m working on videos daily. Color correction is something I think about constantly, it’s part of the job. Jacob Wagler’s editing and color grades are, from a technical standpoint, some of the best I’ve seen. Not “good for social.” Just good. The kind of good where you study the frame wondering just how do you end up with something like this. How he’s handling the highlights, what’s happening in the shadows. As someone who works with post-production tools every day, his work makes me feel inadequate in the best way.
His range is what makes him different from everyone else on this list. Snowmobiles, freestyle dirt bikes, surfing, horse riding, portrait photography, all shot and edited at the same high standard. Each discipline has its own demands, its own timing, its own relationship with light. Jacob switches between them without dropping the quality once. That’s not easy, and most photographers who are technically excellent in one niche fall apart when they try another.
I have to say, his Instagram carousels are flawless. I give them 150 out of 100! The sequencing, the color consistency across images, the way the edit carries a mood from frame to frame, there’s a clear intention behind every one of them. Most photographers who are technically excellent still haven’t figured out how to build a carousel with that kind of cohesion.
He also posts educational content, tutorials, tips, as he says in the bio, “helping photographers create strong, cinematic work”. If you’re developing your own eye, his account is worth studying like a textbook.
What you learn from following him
The shot gets you in the door. The edit is what stays with people. Color grading sets the emotional tone of the work, it’s not a finishing touch, it’s a creative decision made from the start.
Scott Secco – Restraint as a Creative Decision
@scott_secco – Filming mountain bikes was always the dream job for me. Scott Secco is living it, and doing it in a way that makes the rest of the field look like they’re trying too hard.
Most action sports content defaults to sensory overload, fast cuts, color pushed to the limit, music doing half the emotional lifting. Scott does the opposite. His style is cinematic and restrained. Black and white edits. Clean compositions. Work that looks like it was built from a specific visual idea rather than assembled from the best clips of the day. In a genre where everything screams, restraint is a radical choice and it’s my favorite.
I found out about him for a specific rig setup, a gimbal mounted on his back with a camera shooting backwards, filming a downhill rider coming through a technical section directly behind him. The logistics of setting that up, getting the right spacing, having enough trust in the rider behind you, that’s a shot that required serious planning and nerve. It’s the kind of thing you see and immediately understand took weeks to conceptualize and execute.
The detail that stuck with me most, there is a shot in one of his videos, looking straight down, following raindrops in slow motion. Then he posted a separate video explaining exactly how he achieved it. That combination, vision and transparency, is rare. He sees something nobody else thought to shoot, then shows you how it works. That confidence in sharing the method is a mark of someone who knows the magic isn’t in the technique alone.
What you learn from following him
Every great shot starts with a specific intention. Restraint is a creative decision, not a limitation and the best work in action sports usually comes from people who are choosing what NOT to do.
Paddy Cartwright – What Sound Design Actually Sounds Like
@paddy.cartwright – Motorsport, pickup trucks, marathon runners. Rapid cuts, high-energy editing, and the best sound design I’ve heard in action sports content.
Good sound design in short-form action sports content is rare. It’s either absent, a generic stock effect slapped on for emphasis, or so heavy it makes the clip feel like a cartoon. Paddy Cartwright is one of the few creators using sound in a way that actually elevates the content rather than undermining it. The sounds hit where they should, at the intensity they should, and they work with the edit instead of fighting it.
His editing pace is the full opposite of Scott Secco. Where Scott is slow, deliberate, and cinematic, Paddy is chaotic and high-energy. What’s worth understanding is that both approaches work perfectly within their context. Paddy’s content is visceral, it puts you inside the experience of a dirt bike at full throttle or a pickup truck sliding through a corner. The energy of the edit matches the energy of the sport. That match is harder to achieve than it looks, and most creators who try it land somewhere between jarring and exhausting.
The global action camera market is projected to grow from $6.5 billion in 2024 to $16.9 billion by 2034 (Grand View Research, 2024). More creators with better gear than ever before are entering this space. What differentiates the good ones isn’t equipment, it’s judgment. Paddy’s audio-visual pairing is exactly that kind of judgment made visible.
He also tests different lenses and cameras openly, showing his process and gear decisions. If you want to understand how focal length and lens choice affect the feel of action footage, watching him work through that is worth more than most technical tutorials.
What you learn from following him
Sound design can either ruin content or define it. There’s no middle ground and studying Paddy’s work shows you what “done right” actually sounds and feels like.
Blake Pickup – One of Us
@blakepickup – I’ve followed Blake for a long time. Of everyone on this list, he’s the most clearly one of us.
Skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX, downhill MTB. He does these sports. He’s not a commercial photographer who picked up action sports as a niche, he came up inside the culture, and that shows in how he shoots. There’s an intimacy to the angles and a knowledge of the moments that you can’t fake from the outside.
The specific shot I keep thinking about, a skateboarder in a bowl, captured from a ladder positioned above the lip with flash setup arranged in the bowl. The entire rig is visible in his behind-the-scenes content, it’s a full production for a single image. The result is a photograph that doesn’t look like anything else in skateboarding photography right now, because almost nobody is building that kind of intentional infrastructure for a single skate shot. Everyone else is reacting. Blake is constructing.
But the story I find more compelling is the jump he shot twice. First time, he came across a kicker unexpectedly, got the shot anyway, and it was impressive. Second time, he went back with a full setup, full intention, full control over every variable. The difference between the two versions of the same shot is a masterclass in what planning actually changes. Same subject. Same sport. Completely different results.
He explains his creative vision and process consistently, not always in a formal tutorial format, but in the way he talks about what he was going for and why. Following him is as much an education as it is visual inspiration.
What you learn from following him
Being part of the culture you’re filming changes the work in ways that are visible in every frame. Intentionality, the deliberate choice of where to stand, what setup to build, when to press the button, is a separate skill from technical ability. And it’s learnable.
What Actually Separates Great Action Sports Content
Looking at these five creators together, the pattern that stands out isn’t gear or budget. It’s the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject.
Spenny is riding the same jumps as the athletes he films. Blake has done these sports his entire life. Scott’s MTB work carries the confidence of someone who knows exactly what a rider is about to do. That proximity to the activity informs every decision, where to stand, when to press record, what the athlete is about to do next. You can see it in the footage.
The other thing worth noticing, these five approaches couldn’t be more different. Scott’s restraint and Paddy’s chaos are polar opposites. Jacob’s flawless Instagram carousels and Spenny’s casual iPhone experiments sit at opposite ends of the production spectrum. The common thread isn’t style. It’s intention. Every single one of these creators is making deliberate decisions, and those decisions are visible in the work.
Most content fails because it’s reactive. The camera follows what happens. The best action sports content creates the conditions for what it wants to capture, then executes. Sound design separates Paddy’s work from a dozen accounts doing similar subject matter. Color correction separates Jacob’s carousels from photographers who are equally skilled with a camera in the field. These elements aren’t finishing touches, they’re part of the creative vision from the start.
$696.7B
U.S. outdoor recreation economy in 2024 – 2.4% of GDP. The audience for this content is enormous and growing. Source: BEA, 2026
Approximately 70% of action camera owners regularly share their footage on social media (ElectroIQ, 2024). The creators who understand their craft at the level these five do are building something that outlasts any algorithm.
Every element of the final product should be a decision, not a default. That’s the thing you take from following these five.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are the best action sports photographers to follow on Instagram?
Spenny (@gimbalgod), Jacob Wagler (@jacob.wagler), Scott Secco (@scott_secco), Paddy Cartwright (@paddy.cartwright) and Blake Pickup (@blakepickup) are five of the most technically and creatively distinct action sports creators currently active on Instagram for me. Sports accounts average a 1.3% engagement rate, 3.6 times the all-industry median (Rival IQ, 2025) and these five consistently produce work worth stopping for.
Do you need an expensive camera to shoot action sports?
No. Spenny’s shoots with GoPro, iPhone and Red camera, this answers directly, the footage is nearly indistinguishable when the operator knows what they’re doing. Camera quality matters at the margins. Understanding movement, light, and timing matters everywhere. GoPro sold 50 million cameras by 2024 (GoPro Investor Relations, 2024), the tools are widely available. The operators who know how to use them are not.
What makes action sports photography different from other photography disciplines?
You’re working in chaotic, fast-moving environments where the athlete’s safety takes priority and reshooting isn’t always possible. The technical demands of sharp focus and proper exposure are compounded by the need to anticipate the action, position yourself in terrain that’s also moving, and often operate specialized rigs. Proximity to the sport, the way Blake Pickup and Spenny both do the sports they shoot gives an anticipation advantage that no amount of technical training fully replicates.
How important is editing and color grading in action sports content?
Ask Jacob Wagler. His editing is what separates him from photographers who are equally capable with a camera in the field. Color grading sets the emotional tone of the work. Sound design, as Paddy Cartwright demonstrates, can define the entire feel of a clip. The edit is not a post-production step, it’s part of the creative vision from the start, and the best creators treat it that way.
How do these creators share their knowledge?
All five have educational components to their work. Spenny has his academy with GoPro for action sports use. Jacob posts editing tutorials and tips. Scott explained his raindrop shot technique in a dedicated video. Paddy shows his lens and camera testing openly. Blake documents his creative vision and compares spontaneous versus planned versions of the same shot. Following them closely is an ongoing education in visual storytelling.
Filip Petreski is the founder of AFIELD and a multi-sport outdoor athlete. A two-time national cross-country MTB champion, snowboard instructor, and former dirt bike rider, he writes about the people, gear, and culture worth paying attention to in the outdoor world.