Many articles on sports photography will emphasize the importance of high end gear as a necessity of sports

Sports Photography for Amateurs

Sports Photography for Amateurs

photography and to some extent that’s true. Sports photography, like wedding and event photography, has proportionally more reliance on the quality of the equipment you have than on your vision, technical knowledge and inventiveness. You’re capturing uncontrolled and fleeting moments of action where the ability of your camera to quickly and accurately autofocus, change exposure, cope well with low-light and fire off a quick burst of shots plays a decisive role in whether you get the shot and what it looks like. That said, it doesn’t mean that the amateur or aspirant sports photographer wanting to marry a love of sports with a love of photography should give up and leave it to the pros. Sports is not just about the equipment, it’s about anticipation, tactics and luck – and this is learnt from tips and experience and applies no matter what level you operate at. This article covers tips that are universal to sports photography and will give anyone with even the most basic of equipment a shot worth showing!

Tip #1 Know the Game and the Players

You can’t take great sports shots without knowing and understanding the game. It informs where you’ll set your camera up. Which area of the field-of-play you’ll focus on and how you’ll compose your shots. In cricket you know that the field of play is on the crease, in rugby, you understand that once the ball comes out of the scrum it will probably be passed to either the fly-half or the center. In soccer you understand which formation is being used and who the ball will be passed to the most to score.

Knowing the players gives your photography the edge. You may know that a particular player enjoys a particular shot (in cricket) and you can compose to capture that perfectly. You may know of a player that is very emotional and after they achieve a break-through you’ll want to try and get a close-up of their face in celebration. The more knowledge of the game you can apply to your photography, the better your anticipation, composition, positioning and shot selection will be.

Tip #2 Exposure Tips

Generally for fast action you’ll want to use shutter speeds of around 1/500th second. On an entry level camera, you won’t generally want to go above ISO 400 to preserve the best picture quality you can. Aperture setting should be as close to wide open as possible to get as much separation of the action from of the background. If the weather is consistent, then it’s easy. if you’re in partly cloudy conditions, leave your aperture alone at wide open and vary your shutter speed. This is invariably easier to do on an entry-level camera in any case because very often there isn’t a separate button or dial to control exposure.

If you have a decent continuous shooting rate, then capture a series of shots just as the action is about to take place. Remember to delete shots that aren’t worth keeping so that your card doesn’t fill up quickly and you don’t have to deal with hundreds of bad shots.

Tip #3 Over-coming Slow JPEG Burst Rates

What’s This: Slow JPEG burst rates (frames per second) – this is the number of continuous shots your camera can take per second.

If your camera only shoots JPEG at 1, 2 or even 3 frames per second, there’s a good chance you’ll miss the best moment at which bat hits ball (cricket) or the ball passes the goal keeper (soccer). Cameras that can run at 5 or up frames per second certainly give the photographer a much better chance of catching the decisive moment, but if your camera can’t, it doesn’t mean you won’t get the picture. In fact, practicing with single shot mode will enhance your ability to anticipate the moment, or rather, your ability to spot what the moment preceding the decisive moment looks like. It’s also fun to test your timing and anticipation against friends that have the same interest.

Tip #4 Over-coming Poor Performance at High ISO Settings

What’s This: This happens because the image sensor/processor combination is not as good as that on a high-end camera with the result that pictures taken at high ISO’s like 800 and 1600 come out looking noisy.

South Africa’s big three sports – soccer, rugby and cricket - are all outdoor big field sports. The solution is simple. Don’t try to take photos at night or of indoor sports. This is will also eliminate much of the necessity in needing to own an expensive fast lens (fast means a lens that has a very large aperture like f2 or f2.8)

Tip #5 Over-coming Inaccurate or Slow Auto-focusing

What’s This: This happens because your camera may not have many focus points, the focus points may not be custom selectable or the logic the camera uses to focus with may be inferior.

The simple solution to this is to select one area of the field – an area where you’d expect the best action to occur – like a goal line (soccer) or the batsmen’s crease (cricket). Preset your focus to this area by using centre point (spot) focusing to get a lock on either the goal-keeper or the batsmen. Once you’re in-focus, switch to manual focusing to prevent your autofocus from shifting after you’ve taken your first shot.

With sports like cricket, where the action is concentrated on the pitch, this is an excellent strategy. With more flowing sports like rugby and soccer, you may want to follow the action a bit more. If you’re using a pro lens with a good sized barrel that’s easy to turn, you may even find that manual focus works better. Other-wise stick to center point focusing on a single shot servo. Single shot servo finds focus and then holds it till you take the shot. You may have to do a quick composition adjustment after locking focus, but it’s better than the trauma of hoping that action will fall on one of your focus points and that your camera will select the right one. Lenses with ultra-sonic motors are a must with this kind of approach.

Tip #6 Over-coming Not Having the Best Lens

Firstly there are many lenses that are used by sports photographers, including some very wide ones used to capture action on court-based sports where it’s possible to get very close to the players. Secondly, if it was statutory that only the best lenses could be used for sports photography, then it really would be the preserve of the wealthy, as a set of the best lenses could hit you up for a ¼ million rand.

Keeping our focus on the big three field sports though, sports photography in South Africa is all about having a lens to get you close enough. Lenses more than any other piece of equipment make a difference to your overall picture quality.

With rugby and soccer, play tends to move to different parts of the field and you can easily cover the side of the field closest to you with a good 70-200mm lens. There are a number of lenses that cover this range and vary dramatically in price. While it would be a lie to say that you wouldn’t notice the step-up in quality that a high quality top range lens delivers, for many of the budget lenses available from most manufacturers you wouldn’t notice anything bad either. A good reasonably priced option is to upgrade your budget telephoto zoom that may have bought as a kit with your camera to a pro zoom telephoto. Canon’s 70-300mm IS USM, Nikon’s 70-300mm VR, Olympus’s 70-300mm, Pentax’s 55-300mm DA and Sony’s 70-300mm SSM are such examples.

When it comes to cricket, where the arena of play is consistently at the furthest point from you, ie. the centre of the field, a 300mm lens is a minimum, and you will see a dramatic improvement in detail with a lens that reaches 400mm. On APS-C size cameras this translates to a 600-640mm 35mm focal length equivalent. While many of these 600mm equivalent zoom lenses are still expensive, they are far more within reach than their faster fixed focal length equivalents which can cost 4 to 5 times more. The benefit these faster fixed focal length lenses deliver is overall improved sharpness as well as better separation of the action from the background by making use of their faster f-stops.

There are also some very affordable alternatives available by using the Four Thirds system that Olympus uses or using high quality 3rd party lenses that offer the focal length range you require. If there’s one area you should invest what you can into, it’s the lens. Remember cameras can come and go, but a good lens can last a lifetime. Many of these lenses can also be used for other applications like wild-life or portrait photography.