As a would-be sports photographer, one of the most important things you can do is become knowledgeable about the sports you want to shoot. The most successful sports photographers are the ones who can anticipate the next play or event and put themselves in a position to trip the shutter in time to record the moment.
Setting your ISO speed
Being able to change the film speed or ISO (International Organization for Standardization) rating of your camera on the fly is one of the great benefits of owning a digital camera. Be sure to check your camera's instructions to see how to change the ISO setting.
When conditions permit, always try to work at 100 or 200 ISO to get the highest-quality images. If you have to move indoors or if the sun is getting lower in the sky, ratchet the speed up to 400 ISO and use a flash unit if circumstances permit.
Many digital cameras allow ISO settings as high as 800 and 1600, but try to avoid using these settings unless it's the only way to keep shooting. Images shot at these ISO settings tend to need a little more tweaking in an image editor than lower-ISO shots and also offer less margin for error when it comes to exposure.
High ISO settings let you use faster shutter speeds, which mean sharper images, but higher ISO settings also produce noisier images. Noise is the digital film version of conventional film's grain.
Freezing action with fast shutter speeds or an accessory flash
Today's athletes are well trained, well conditioned, and well prepared. As a result, they're faster than ever. To freeze their movements, you need to use either a fast shutter speed or an accessory flash unit. Another consideration is the relationship between the direction in which your subject is moving and your camera's orientation. Here are some tips to keep in mind:
- Fast shutter speed: If your subject is moving toward you or away from you, you can get by with a slower shutter speed than if your subject is moving across your field of view. Figure 1 shows a speedboat and water skier headed away from the camera. The action was stopped at a relatively slow 1/125 of a second.
- Accessory flash: As light levels drop, an accessory flash's quick burst of light can freeze action that a slow shutter speed might not. Whether you can use flash depends on the particular sport you're shooting. It's not usually a problem to shoot football or basketball with a flash unit. Athletes such as tennis players tend to be more sensitive to flash photography, so plan accordingly.
Short-duration shutter speeds can often be the key to stopping action. The brief time that the shutter is open registers only an instant of motion. Longer shutter speeds give your subject time to move farther or make more movements while the image is being recorded, which results in blurred photographs. Generally, your choice is to use the fastest shutter speed possible.
Stopping action with slow shutter speeds
You can often stop action by using a slower shutter speed, too. Indeed, the effects might be more realistic than the frozen-statue look that you get when sports participants are stopped dead in their tracks. Here are some tips for stopping action at slower shutter speeds:
- Look for momentary pauses. Many times, a sport has a moment of peak action where the action hesitates before movement returns. Think of a jumper on the ascent. At the top of the leap is a moment of stasis - hanging in space before dropping back down, as shown in the bicycle shot in Figure 2.
- Try to shoot the action moving directly toward the camera. Athletes and machines moving toward the camera require a slower shutter speed and faster autofocus to freeze motion than those moving laterally across the camera's field of view.
- Concentrate. The most dramatic image can be the concentration of the athlete the moment before he or she begins play. Think of the pitcher looking to the catcher for a sign, or a tennis player just before serving the ball.
- Find action in nonaction moments. Another shot to look for is one that shows the price the athlete pays for his or her sport. This can be football players on the bench with steam rising off their heads or a spent distance runner leaning on a teammate at the end of a race.
