Sports photography tips and advice please

[grayhaire]

The suggestion "I keep both eyes open. One looking through the viewfinder and the other looking at action outside the frame." is a good one. At the scrimmage I shot, I thought a play was going around thr right end. The runner came through the middle of the line. It would have really been full frame if I knew he was coming. He was polite enough not to runover me.

[jeffkohn]

have used a custom function on my 20D that works great. It sets the exposure lock button to perform a focus. This I believe is custom function 4 setting 2. What this does is allow me to press the EL button to focus, and then press the shutter as much as I want. It will auto facus again when I press the EL button. This took some getting used to, but I love it for sports. Why? I can pre-focus for an area of action, and not worry about shutter button messing up the focus or having to reach for the manual focus button. This also for me provided me with more keepers as I can pre-focus on an area in football and basketball that I expect the action to be at, and refocus as needed. This refocus is usually faster as the focus mechanism does not usually have travel as far, usually....

Not sure what other cameras have this custom function. Think the 350D and higher Canons, but not sure about Nikons. Do not think any non-slr have this type feature.

Nikon calls this functionality AF-ON, you can map the EL button to do this on the D70. The D1/D2 series have a dedicated button for AF-ON. I definitely think it's the best way to focus once you get used to it, because it gives you more control. In fact I always focus this way, not just for sports but everything else too. It makes focus/recompose much easier, among other things.

[jhom]

Probably the best tip I can give in shooting sports is practice. If I know that I have a shoot of a given team, I will go out during their practices and shoot. I like to get a feel of their style and movement. Then during a game, I am more prepared to pick what I want to capture.

[dreemes]

I see mention of using flash. Couldn't this be hazardous to the photographers health? Putting myself in the receiver's position for a moment, I think that if a photographer fired off a flash as I am trying to catch the ball and it blinded or distracted me and caused me to drop it and miss out on a TD, the next play I'd be asking the QB to aim the ball in the area of that photographer.

[aggarcia]

Sports shots takes lots of pratice and knowing the limitations of oyur equipment. I started out shooting motorsports using a Canon D30 and a Sigma 70-300 4.5-5.6 . Was this the proper equipment for the task - No. But learning the weakness in the D30's autofocus and the speed of the lens, I learned to take some evey good shots with what I had. Better equipment makes it easier, but the photographer is more important than the equipment.

Like others have mentioned, know the sport you are shooting. Once you know the sport you will be able to better predict events and track what's going on. I personally use shutter speeds of 50 - 100 for slow speed pans and 200-500 for action shots. The autofocus on the 20D is really fast, so I have not had to prefocus like I did with the D30.

Hotled mentioned trouble with slower shutter speeds getting sharp pictures. The Rebel only has AI Servo in Sports mode. Sports mode is also locked to 400 iso. I think one of the hack for the rebel fixes that, but you might research the Canon Forums for more details.

[Gordon]

There's a lot of good advice in this thread.

One thing that can really ruin a good sports shot is clutter/ junk/ distractions in the background. Usually you can pick a spot that you know the action will pass through, so you can pay a lot of attention to the background of the image. E.g., if you are shooting a road sport, pick somewhere where the background will not have large orange cones or busy, bright signs in the background. If you can, also pay attention to the ambient light - shooting with the subject in sunlight and the background in shade can really help the subject pop too. You can also change location so that the light will be in the face of the subjects, so that they aren't lost in shadow - this can vary depending on the sport - with helmets/ face masks etc, it often makes sense to shoot from the non-lit side, so that the face doesn't disappear in to complete shadow.

Certainly there is a whole lot of unpredictability and dynamic motion to consider, but a bit of upfront attention to where you stand in relation to the action can make a huge difference in your pictures.

E.g., I walked a bit to find a corner on the course with clean, consistant coloured background trees, that would go out of focus and not be distracting



instead of in this case, I picked a bad place to stand - maybe 10 yards further down
the background would have been a more uniform grey and I could have avoided the
orange cone:



Subject in light, background in shadow

[Gordon]

On focusing, particularly with a camera with only a few focus points like the 10D, it can be worth decoupling the shutter from the auto focus. There is a custom function that lets you put the autofocus on the '*' button. This allows you to focus and shoot as two distinct presses. You have auto focus when you need it, you have focus/ recompose when you need it, and you can pre-focus on a spot when you need it too - all without changing any switches - just depending on how you press the two buttons * and shutter. It can take a bit to get used to but is really powerful. With most of the full time manual focus canon lenses, this also lets you manually focus along with everything else.

Lots of flexibility with a very small change. Takes a bit to get used to focusing with the rear button, but now I'm lost without it.

[grayhaire]

Thanks a lot guys. This is great feedback. Can't tell you how much i appreciate it.

[mramos]

www.daveblackphotography.com/workshop/index.htm has some cool little workshop readings about sports photography and using flash. Not sure if this was mentioned earlier, but nice to read.

[hotled]

Well the more I shoot, the more I believe the Sigma 2.8 and Reb XT has issues.
I have been shooting some r/c as you may already know. I can tell for one thing, AI servo is way to slow for a fast sport like that, it's either that or back focus when using it.
I was just shooting today at the field with decent light, and tried to catch a real fast plane, probably 70+mph, no way in heck I could.
I shot full manual at 2000+, ISO 400 and 800 at 3.2, and 2.8 AI servo mode.
I could not get a clear image of that plane even though thru the view finder it looked spot on, on allot of them I did notice the backround, which is several hundred feet away was in better focus.
I'm about to send this lens and camera off to get it tested, unless someone near me can test it out.
Out of 36 shots I got 4 keepers and that was of a heli that flew slow.
Sometimes I get better than a 50% keep rate but tonight I got zilch....just seems real odd.

[AjP]

Sigma 70-200 2.8 is nice lense, not as fast as Canon but still good one, I didn't try for sports, usually use Canon 70-200 2.8L IS or just last night tried 300 2.8L and even so I deleted about 50% and out the rest only 20 shots are really really worth attention, something like this, and I'm really happy to come home with shots like this.