Mastering Digital Photography

Digital sports photography is all about capturing the emotion and feelings behind the sports that you are photographing, and gives you a real chance to get right up close and personal with the sports as though you are part of the action.

When photographing sports, the main thing you want to achieve is close and sharp photographs with no background clutter.  Most sports are watched from a distance such as football, baseball, motor sports and many others which mean a good telephoto lens is essential to pull up the image nice and close so you can see what is going on.  Most digital SLR cameras have a standard lens mount e.g. Nikon and Canon have a standard mount and are compatible with many lenses from previous model film camera’s.  Have a look on an online auction site if you do not yet have a telephoto lens as you may be pleasantly surprised at what a bargain you can get.  The main thing here is to have a telephoto lens, it doesn’t have to have all bells and whistles, as long as it gets the result that is all that matters.  For many years I used an entry level Sigma telephoto lens before I could afford to replace it with a better Nikon lens, but am I glad I bought the Sigma because it got me some stunning photos I otherwise would not have got!

Once you have got a telephoto lens sorted out, the next stage is to make sure your shutter speed is going to be nice and quick.  Now depending on the lighting available and the type of sport you are photographing, you may want to play with some different settings.  By increasing the ISO, you will get a quicker shutter speed, by reducing the depth of field (widening the aperture), you will get a quicker shutter speed.  WIth a telephoto lens, there is always a chance of camera shake because you are pulled in much closer to the subject so it would be a good idea to invest in a beanbag or a monopod / tripod so you have some form of support, if you cannot afford a tripod, or it isn’t convenient then you can wrap up your jacket and put it on a fence / wall or other solid support in order to get a stable position which will result in much sharper photos, trust me.  To get a nice sharp photo with moving sports, you should ensure you move with the subject (as above), not holding the camera still and have the subject zoom through the photo and try and capture them, this will result in a sharp background, and blurred action…  Not what we want.  You should use a technique known as ‘panning’ which is basically following the subject with a point in the viewfinder, the middle works best and locking onto where they are moving.  Now you may think that’s all good and well but what about focusing, my camera cant keep up with the speed of the subject?  Well, that is where focus lock comes into play, most camera’s even the cheapest compact digital cameras have focus lock – when you hold the shutter release half way down, that locks the focus unless it has been manually changed to continuous focus.  The benefit of focus lock is that you can pick a point where you want to take the final photo, focus on that point and lock the focus and then still holding the focus lock move the camera with the subject, and when they pass though the area you originally focused on you can take the photo, resulting in a nice sharp image focused on where they were moving through (whilst panning with them of course).

I hope you have an improved result with digital sports photography following this article and should you wish to ask any questions, please comment this post or send me a message via Twitter, you can follow me too to keep up to date @masteringdp

Thanks for reading, Simon.