The New England Patriots have the NFL record for the most Super Bowl appearances – tied with the Pittsburgh Steelers – and photographer David Silverman has been on the sidelines, camera in hand, for nearly all of them.
On Sunday, February 08, the Patriots will face off against the Seattle Seahawks at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. For sports photographer David Silverman (@dspicsphoto), the event marks his 11th time at the Super Bowl – including every Patriots Super Bowl appearance except the 1985 game.
Silverman, who is a freelance photographer and has shot for the Patriots for 34 years, started capturing the games with a manual focus, manual wind film camera. For the 2026 Super Bowl, he’ll be on the sidelines on game day with three mirrorless bodies.
The sports photography veteran has packed three Sony A1 bodies for the game, along with four lenses: a 16-35mm, 12-24mm, 70-200mm, and a 200-600mm. For the pre-game team photo event, Silverman packed a Sony A7R IV with a 24-105mm lens. (The first time he tried a Sony was, ironically, at a Super Bowl, when Sony representatives attended the game in 2017.)
The Sony A1’s 30 fps burst speed is a far cry from the gear that Silverman started out with. He was working at a film lab when he connected with someone who was an intern for the Patriots at the time, a connection that meant he stepped straight from film development to sports photography on the NFL level.
At the beginning of his career, Silverman worked with an all-manual film Nikon, including manual focus, taking photos only “as fast as I could turn the handle,” he laughed. He has worked with several different camera brands over the years, switching to Canon as autofocus SLRs became mainstream.
But perhaps the biggest difference between Silverman’s first Super Bowl experience to now is what happens after the click of the shutter. “Doing film, I was up all night and delivering it the next day by car and making 8 by 10s in my darkroom at home. Now, I literally take a card out. Nowadays, we have a wire transfer right connected to our camera, and it's sent to somebody who's editing, at any location.”
Silverman says he was an early adopter of digital, switching around 1998-1999, recalling staying up all night after spotting the digital cameras at CES. The transition from DSLR to mirrorless then changed the game again, largely with the ability to preview your exposure from the viewfinder.
Experiencing the Super Bowl from the sidelines is a childhood dream that Silverman has now experienced several times over. “It's not your average game,” he said. “If you shoot a game during the year, it's exciting. [The Super Bowl] ramps it up about a 1000%. Your adrenaline's going all day long of what can be, what should happen, what could happen. You're on a high all day long.”
The biggest challenge, he says, is getting the shot with all the other people there. In the past, on the sidelines, there were so many people that Silverman would have his brother reserve his spot on the sideline with his gear while he photographed pre-game. After COVID-19, the sidelines aren’t quite as crowded, and there’s now usually a little more to move around.
Silverman advises budding sports photographers to just keep shooting – and play nice. “The best thing you can do is work hard and be nice. And that gets you a lot. If you're a good shooter and you're a nice person, that gets you ahead.”
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