Sports Photography
By capturing athletes, coaches, and fans at the perfect moment, sports photographs can depict the passion, drama, and emotion that fuels sporting events. Sports photographers must aim and shoot quickly to keep up with the action around them, and it’s best practice to use a higher ISO to shoot at faster shutter speeds. Sports photographers also use long, heavy lenses for zooming in on the action. Interesting angles can help make your work stand out in this genre.
your 10 tips
1.Have a lens that can zoom in a long way. A focal length greater than 200mm is obviously better as it will allow you to get close to the action and without being able to zoom in, you won’t be able to isolate any of your subjects.
2. Do NOT use full automatic mode.
This is a common mistake made by non professional photographers.
3. Use a fast shutter speed.
In sports photography, you want to make sure that the shutter speed on your camera is fast enough to capture the quick moving bodies of the athletes.
4. Use Aperture Priority mode.
The modes on a classic DSLR are Automatic, Program Automatic, Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority and Manual.
5. Watch your ISO.
Shutter speed, as you can tell, is majorly important. To control the correct exposure we use 3 components, which are aperture, shutter speed and ISO.
6. Use Shutter Priority Mode if Aperture Priority isn’t obtainable.
This setting is best used for non-SLR photographers who just have a camera that enables shutter speed settings.
7. Use a fast auto-focus and burst mode.
In order for the camera to keep up with the quick movements we want to set it to continually focus on our subject or subjects rather than lock on to one spot.
8. Position yourself correctly and know your sport.
The best thing you can do is to position yourself with the sun behind your back.
9. Take lots and lots of photos.
Whether it be a football player kicking the ball or a tennis player serving, once you have your subject in the frame you can half-hold the shutter button to focus and then hold down to take a photo and capture as many photos per second as you can, thanks to the previous burst modes we have set.
10. Take it from a low angle, such as your knees and use a mono pod.
If you’re shooting from your knees you are capturing much more of a dramatic angle as well as letting in more of a clear background rather than other athletes and grass. The lower perspective gives the photo excellent depth and it’s a technique that you will see all expert photographers doing.
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