Gallery

The sport in pictures

Click any image to enlarge.

A team of players in camouflage fatigues posing together with paintball markers beside a wooden field structure — **The team game** Paintball is played in teams, and the social side of it is a large part of why the sport grew as fast as it did.

A player in camouflage and face paint lying prone and aiming a marker — **Woodsball** The original form of the game — natural terrain, real cover, and stealth over rate of fire.

A young player in camouflage holding a paintball mask and marker at an outdoor field — **Mask first** Eye protection is the one piece of equipment with no exceptions, and the reason paintball's safety record is as good as it is.

Close-up of hundreds of glossy red .68 caliber paintballs filling the frame — **.68 caliber** Roughly 17 mm across and about three grams filled — a gelatin shell around a water-soluble, food-grade fill. The direct descendant of Charles Nelson's tree-marking pellet.

About these photographs

These images illustrate the modern sport. If you have historical photographs — Nel-Spot 007s, early National Survival Game fields, 1980s and 1990s tournament play — we would like to hear from you. Get in touch.

The story behind the pictures

How a forestry tool became a sport played in more than forty countries.

Read the history