Photographing Sports

[Simoli]

This past weekend I went to my wife's soccer game to shoot some pics. Pics can be seen here (http://www.simoli.net/Pages/pages%20Misc/anne's_soccer.htm). I really don't understand how the pros get good pics. Seems that I spent alot of time looking through the view finder. Ever time I put the camera down something interesting happened. I suppose having a mono pod would have made the task a little easier. I also need to figure out how to be on both ends of the field at the same time, I felt like the action always went to the "other" end of the field.

[FlyingPhotog]

Honestly, that's not a half bad job on your part...

Considering you're dealing with inconsistant lighting in a park surrounded by trees and are trying to follow something that I bet you don't shoot every day, I'd say you definately have some keepers!

Practice, practice and more practice will make the nuts and bolts of shooting more instinctive so you can concentrate more outside the viewfinder. Have you tried shooting with both eyes open?

[Simoli]

Have you tried shooting with both eyes open?Towards the end of the game it dawned on me. Both eyes open definitely helped.

T
I did lose my golden hour sun. The later photos are all without direct sunlight. I should have showed up earlier:D.

[ACDCROCKS]

Gota study the game. I usually just sit on the ground indian style with a monopod and follow the ball. Always think ahead. Once you shoot it enough your intuition takes over and you'll snap with out thinking. You'll see once you do it day in day out.

[Zilly]

Ive just done a series of posts about sports photography on my blog might be worth checking out (not going to copy and paste it over as its a 4 page essay)

Start at part 1 and work your way threw
http://photomakers.blogspot.com/

[AdamC]

Pasted here verbatim is a reply I got to the same question some time ago. I've treated it more or less as my bible.


Here are some basics for shooting sports. I wrote this for soccer, but it applies more or less to any action sport:

1. Shoot tight.

2. Crop tighter.

3. Subject to occasional intentional rule-breaking exceptions, what you're shooting for is face/ball/action/contact. No particular order, and the more the better, but with *very* few exceptions, a shot without a face and the ball goes in the trash (assuming, of course, that the sport employs a ball...). Expressions matter a lot.

CAVEAT on the ball "rule:" I've been shooting a fair amount of lacrosse lately and realized that this guideline doesn't apply to sports like LAX and American football where some players are likely to go the entire game without touching the ball — or in the case of football linesmen, for example, even getting anywhere near it. For sports and players like these, you can more or less forget the ball and just go for face/action/contact. I'm not sure how this applies to baseball, where mostly nothing happens at all. I guess there you're just going for face. ;-)

4. Watch your backgrounds, both while shooting and in editing. Shooting big apertures wide open will help to blow out distracting backgrounds to a pleasing blur. (And I've been known to move garbage cans — physically, not digitally — to get them out my backgrounds.)

5. Unless you're going for the (very) occasional intentional effect, keep your horizon level. Fix it in the crop if necessary.

6. Don't be afraid to cut off body parts, but don't cut them off at the joint. I.e., don't cut off a leg at the ankle or the knee, and don't cut off an arm at the elbow or the wrist. It's something subliminal about the way the brain processes the image that makes a shot cropped that way vaguely disturbing and off-putting.

7. For the little guys, get down low and shoot from their level. Some people use knee pads (available cheap from Home Depot) for this purpose. My knees aren't so good, so I use a wonderful little folding three-legged camp stool that swivels.

8. Pay some attention to the overall "design" of your image — the way the various visual elements interact. This isn't high art we're engaged in here, but a little art goes a long way to make a better image. (E.g., remember the "rule of thirds," and think about diagonals in your image...)

9. Shooting RAW will leave you more latitude to recover from exposure and WB excursions, and often gives you better ability to handle high contrast situations like bright overhead sun and white uniforms without blowing the highlights, or to recover from unintentional (or intentional, see settings discussion below) underexposure. (A good RAW workflow can be just as fast and efficient as jpg, but that's another topic entirely.)

10. Flash sucks (but sometimes there's no choice, like shooting American football in dark high school endzones...)

11. If you can, use a monopod.

12. Don't be afraid to trade ISO for shutter speed. A sharp noisy image is better than a clean blurry one.

13. Shoot a lot. Then shoot some more.

14. Only show the good ones.

15. What you consider a good one will change over time.

16. Shoot tight.


Camera settings (some but not all Canon-specific):

For outdoor sports I shoot in Av (Canon-speak for aperture-priority), evaluative, lens wide open, i.e. typically f/2.8 outdoors and f/2 inside. I always shoot wide open not only for the additional shutter speed it affords but moreso because I like an out of focus background that isolates the subject better.

I shoot at the lowest ISO that will give me plenty of shutter speed, and the more shutter speed the better. This not only helps to stop action but also makes up somewhat for my sloppy camera handling skills.

In broad daylight that might translate to starting out at something like ISO 200, 1/3200 at f/2.8. As the light falls I'll start easing up the ISO to keep the shutter speed at least up around 1/2500 or so until maybe I hit ISO 800. Then I'll let the shutter speed float on down till it gets to maybe 1/1000 or 1/1500 or so, then to keep it there I'll start ratcheting up the ISO again in steps till it hits 1600. Then I'll let the shutter speed continue to float down till I'm at 1/400. And *then* I'll switch to manual mode, 1/400 @ f/2.8, because I've found that for me, 1/400 is the absolute minimum to get reasonable stopped action. 1/320 or less and it really starts to fall apart.

At that point, depending on the stadium lighting I'll either stay at 1/400, f/2.8, ISO 1600 or if it's really dark (and it often is), with the 1D Mark II or Mark II N I'll go all the way to ISO 3200. I wouldn't do that with the original 1D, but with the Mark II's and other later Canon bodies, ISO 3200 is really very usable, especially if you crank up the black point in the RAW conversion (and I should add that I shoot RAW exclusively and process with C1) to block up the shadows and mask the noise. And I'll underexpose and push the conversion rather than going below 1/400. Again — a sharp noisy shot is better than a blurry cleaner one.

This all probably sounds complicated but it's not. Really all you do is keep an eye on your shutter speed and crank up the ISO as necessary to keep it where you want it. IOW, exposure becomes a dynamic combination not just of shutter speed and aperture, but of those two things and ISO. This is one of the many great things about digital as opposed to shooting film. In fact, for me it's really just shutter speed and ISO, since it's so rare for me to shoot at anything other than max aperture.

For indoor sports go manual. In the cavelike HS gyms where I shoot, that usually means ISO 3200, 1/400 at f/2. Here again, I will underexpose rather than go below 1/400.

As for focus, try center point only (I've experimented with CF17-1 and -2 on the 1-series bodies and have gone back to CF17-0, and I find auto focus point selection useful only for birds in flight), AI servo of course, and CF4-3 to activate AF with the * button. That takes a little getting used to, but once you do it makes it a lot easier to lead the AF before hitting the shutter, and to keep tracking the subject with AF on while hitting the shutter periodically. It also allows you to effectively use AI servo as one-shot to lock focus and recompose, just by focusing with * and then releasing it to lock focus, e.g., for reaction shots of the bench. (CF4-3 gives you a new AE reading for each frame in a burst. This is useful when you're tracking players in and out of sun and shadow. CF4-1 locks AE at the half shutter press, so every frame in a burst gets the same exposure. Some people prefer that; I don't.)

IMPORTANT: Note that on all Canon DSLR's, in AI servo the first frame in a burst is release-priority, i.e., the shutter will fire even if focus is not acquired. Subsequent frames in the burst are focus-priority. The result is you will not infrequently find that the first frame in a sequence is OOF, and subsequent frames sharp. The best cure for this is leading the AF and giving it a chance to catch up to the subject before you fire the shutter, and also always firing at least two or three frames, as you have a better chance of the later ones being in focus. [CAVEAT: The 1D Mark III has additional options in this regard. Not having a Mark III, I'm not in a position to comment on them. Note also that the CF numbers and combinations have changed in the Mark III and 40D, so you'll have to do a little translating on that with respect to some of the other advice in this post.]


Some clarification on what I mean when I say "Shoot (and crop) tight." This obviously doesn't always mean cutting off arms and legs and ears. Context can be important to tell the shot's story. What is does mean is to try to leave out everything that's not important to that story and especially to eliminate anything that distracts from it.

One last thought by way of encouragement — shooting sports is hard, and it stays hard. I've shot over a half million frames of sports over the last few years, and I've learned some things, and I've gotten better at it, but I've still got a long way to go. That's part of what makes it so much fun, just like fly-fishing. There's always something new to learn, and you can always get better, but you can still really enjoy yourself along the way, and if you do it a lot you'll inevitably stumble onto some very satisfying results.

As far as keeper ratio is concerned, don't let it get you down, and rejoice in the fact that you're shooting digital so your marginal cost is zero. I thought I had done pretty well when I got my keeper ratio up to a fairly constant 20% or so. After a while it went down, though, to a pretty consistent 10% — mostly because I got pickier about what I consider a keeper. More recently still it's started creeping back up, because I've begun to adopt a slightly more deliberate shooting style that tends to bring me home with about half the number of frames I used to shoot at a given event — but I bet it's still not as high as 20%.

All this is just what I've learned from experience. That doesn't mean it's all right. Discussion encouraged.

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net (http://www.toulme.net)

[Gatorboy]

These aren't soccer specific, but I have written some general sports shooting tips that may help:

Don’t Shoot Till You See the Whites of Their Eyes: Tips to Taking Better Sports Pictures (http://www.davehoffmannphoto.com/imageEngineer/2008/06/dont-shoot-till-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes-tips-to-taking-better-sports-pictures/)

[DC Fan]

Seems that I spent a lot of time looking through the view finder. Ever time I put the camera down something interesting happened.
Welcome to the real world of sports photography, where nothing is planned and controlled, and you need to be constantly prepared for something unexpected to happen. You may spend a long time waiting, but be certain that the wait will pay off with a good image - if you can blend your patience with preparation.

Photographer David Burnett has some good observations on how he approaches an event, (http://kennethjarecke.typepad.com/mostly_true/2008/08/talking-photography-with-david-burnett.html) and how he came up with one of the most notable images of recent years - the picture of a fallen Mary Decker at the Olympic Games in 1984. (http://pa.photoshelter.com/c/contact/gallery-img-show?G_ID=G0000vC2aZ6QuQQ0&_bqG=3&_bqH=eJyLqvCwcMpyLzeqMAuxcMzxMM8L9nHK9zRwzky2MjIFI Sv3eE8XW3cDIChzNkqMMgssDQw0UHP3jHd39PFxDYrEJg0AX.I ZBQ--&I_ID=I0000zQQJ0MTsx98) Sometimes you're just in the right place at the right time, and if you're ready for the moment, you'll get a great picture.

[Simoli]

Looks like I started exactly at the wrong end. I set the camera to 1/250s and let the aperature float.

Now I'm looking forward to next Sunday's game.

[triggersnappy]

they're pretty good shots man =) you'll get better don't despair =D

i shoot mostly events / music shots but a good mate of mine does a lot of sports as well as events. there's a lot of overlapping between the two. you say that u feel like u miss out on the action when u area t one end of the field. i sometimes feel that way too but the trick is to get ur settings right at one end and WAIT for the action to come to you. no need to get flustered and chase the action and eventually you'll end up with good shot!

Keep it up!

[JeffreyG]

Looks like I started exactly at the wrong end. I set the camera to 1/250s and let the aperature float.

Now I'm looking forward to next Sunday's game.

You will get better. If you have good glass that you trust to shoot wide open, then shoot wide open all the time and use ISO to force the shutter speed you need.

You can never have too much shutter speed.

[AdamC]

Looks like I started exactly at the wrong end. I set the camera to 1/250s and let the aperature float.

Now I'm looking forward to next Sunday's game.


1/250 is way too slow. I try to keep over 1/2000 if I can, but 1/1000 as a bare minimum.

Soccer is hard - don't be discouraged, and keep shooting! :)

[Zilly]

1/250 is way too slow. I try to keep over 1/2000 if I can, but 1/1000 as a bare minimum.

Soccer is hard - don't be discouraged, and keep shooting! :)

1/2000th is over kill Idealy i want 1/1250 of a second but anythig about 1/500th of a second is good altho i do regauly find my self shooting evening soccor at sub 1/
320th

[AdamC]

Idealy i want 1/1250 of a second

I have shots of around that speed with motion blur on the ball... :)

[Zilly]

f2.8 iso 3200 1/500th
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3261/2683115300_c2617afec3_o.jpg