Sports Photography: Where The Action Is

Another specialized area of photography is shooting live sporting events.  This activity can be anything from using a cellphone to snap a photo of someone’s child during a t-ball game to a professional sports photographer skimming along the sidelines at an NFL game hoping to capture a brilliant collision of armored warriors.

Most of the time, shooting sports requires a very fast shutter speed.  It is usually desired to stop the action cold.  But increasing shutter speed means less light hitting the image sensor or film emulsion.  If shooting outdoors in the bright sunlight, that problem is solved.  But capturing sports action indoors or on a dark, cloudy day can be challenging.  Increasing the ISO helps, but pushing the ISO too high introduces noise in the images.  Then you lose image quality.

One compromise would be to allow a little motion blur by lowering the shutter speed a bit, which could render some of the players fairly still while those involved in fast action may be slightly blurry, which gives the viewer a feeling of motion.

Another camera setting that is critical to sports photography is the aperture.  In order to allow as much light as possible onto the camera sensor, shooting with a fairly wide aperture is necessary.  But wide open means a very narrow depth of field, e.g. some subjects will be in focus but much of the scene will not.  That can work out fine, but nailing the focus on the subject you are trying to shoot can be difficult.  Another aid to focusing on a moving subject is the continuous-servo Autofocus mode.  With this camera setting, holding down the focus button will allow the camera to continually adjust the focus to keep the subject sharp as it moves.

Finally, when shooting a sporting event, the photographer must learn enough about that sport to be able to anticipate when an action shot is about to happen.  If he knows nothing about soccer, for example, he will find capturing great action moments extremely difficult.  If he studies how the game is played, however, he can anticipate what might happen in the next second or two and be ready to press the shutter release button at just the right moment.