Photo Disect - Simple Sport Shots

Sports photography, like event photography, is a discipline that will see you heading home with hundreds of photos on your card to sort through, especially if, like me, you are doing it as a job. With so many shots to individually sort through and post, I don't want to be doing edits on individual photos to perfect brightness, saturation and everything else. This means I'll always try to get the settings right on-camera as much as possible. It is inevitable though that you'll need to crop almost every sports shot you take, as the action is usually quite fast and unpredictable.

Here is a simple example.

I haven't edited the photo in photoshop - only cropped from this, the original image from the camera:


I have hundreds of sports shots to choose from but this one is a better example, there's a definite scene unfolding - you can see competition between the teams and most importantly for ball sports, you can see the ball. It's not difficult to understand the concept of a good sports photo, however it can be extremely difficult to nail your technique, especially with consistency.

I have shot this photo in aperture priority mode on f/7.1 and ISO800. This gave me a very fast shutter speed of 1/3200s. I have selected f/7.1 as a decently sharp aperture for my lens - a 70-300mm telephoto. Cheaper plastic lenses like mine don't cope too well at smaller f/numbers like 4-5.6, especially when zoomed to the maximum. This is why I like to stay around f/8 to ensure good sharpness. I will use ISO800 even on bright days to get as fast a shutter speed as possible to stop the action. 1/400 is probably the slowest you would want to be shooting at. Don't be afraid to go to higher ISOs if it will mean you get a sharp shutter speed - its better to have a grainy sharp shot than a blurry one! Sports shooting is about capturing moments as they happen, and its ok to sacrifice some image quality to make sure you get 'the shot'. I shoot JPEGs with my personal +2 saturation edit so the shots come up vibrant and natural off camera (tutorial here).

Nailing the technical stuff is important and can be difficult, but as I said you should be fine shooting aperture priority at ISO800-1600 and around f/8. If the photos are too dark or too bright, use your exposure wheel to compensate. Keep in mind these settings are best for shooting outside in the daytime. If you are shooting indoors or at night, you're best cranking your ISO as high as possible and having your f/number as low as possible. You still may struggle to get a fast shutter speed - unfortunately the best way to shoot indoors or at night is by spending thousands and thousands on cameras with great high ISO perfomance (eg. Canon 1d markIV for $6000) and lenses with apertures around and below f/2.8 (eg. Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS for $3000). Ouch!! If you must shoot indoors or at night, try out that 50mm f/1.8 of yours that you picked up for a lowly $130. You won't get as close, but you'll be able to use f/1.8 to get a very fast shutter speed, making your shots nice and sharp - just make sure you crop in photoshop afterwards.

More on the technical side - autofocus. You will want to shoot on continous autofocus mode, which means that the camera will constantly change focus based on what youre pointing the camera at. For example if a player comes toward you, the camera will continously focus on the player closer and closer and you can shoot as you please. On Canon DSLRs this is called AI focus, on Nikons I believe it is AF-C. DSLRs also give you the option of selecting one certain point to focus with (check out this page and scroll down to 'autofocus points'). I always find that the middle point is perfect, and very simple. With all the action going on to worry about, its best to simplify your focussing as much as possible - so remember, always shoot continous focus mode with the middle point.

Now that we're done with settings, lets move on to something even more important - where you take the photo from. Obviously firstly try to be as close to the action as possible. The best shots will tend to be taken as the player is coming towards the camera. For example shooting something like rugby its always good to shoot up and down the sideline (yes, you have to run) and stay about 20 or 30m in front of the where the action is happening. As the play gets closer to the goal you would want to shoot from behind the goal-line. This is going to be different with every sport but just keep in mind that a player facing or running towards the camera will always be a simple way to get a great shot.

Another part of your positioning will be to do with lighting, especially during the day. If it's cloudy, you can actually count yourself lucky as you'll be able to get great shots from all angles (even if you have to bump up the ISO for darkness). If it's sunny, you have to be very aware. You have no control over which way the sun is shining, only over where you position yourself in relation to it. Always try to have the sun at your back so players are well lit. Most sports will have teams running in different directions per half so you will get away with it, but sometimes like with athletics you won't get a choice. Try to only shoot with the sun behind players' backs when you absolutely need to. Here's an example of a photo taken with the sun behind a player's back. Usually you will need to dial up your exposure wheel to compensate for the dark shadows.

The photo has still turned out ok, but you can see how bright the grass is compared to the player, taking away the eye's natural focus towards the action. Scroll back up to the original photo I posted and you can see the difference. As I've said, if you can help it, try your best to get the sun pointed at your subject.

There's really only one more thing to cover, which is the most obvious but without some decent experience can easily be the most difficult. Pressing the button! It's surprisingly hard to capture a certain moment in sport - getting that ball sailing perfectly off a foot, capturing a high jump right at its peak, etc. This can really only be helped by combination of experience, knowledge of the sport and using a DSLR, which has no lag between when you hit the button and when the picture is taken. People think that they can buy a camera with 7 photos per second and they'll just hold the button down and hope to get the shot. Surpringly, sport tends to happen even faster than that so no matter how fast your speed, you still need to hit that button at the exact time. There's an easy way to practice this. It sounds silly, but I've taken this advice from some professional sports shooters, to just sit at home and take photos of the sport on TV. Practice hitting the shutter button at the very best moment - you'll be surprised how much it helps you.

There's not really much more I can think of right now. Keep in mind that this tutorial is for capturing 'simple' sports photos. Like anything, there is infinite room to be a bit more creative, but for general sports shooting, this tutorial should have you covered. If you don't like sport much (photographers tend to be pretty nerdy), it's still very helpful for your photography to get out and shoot the action. It is awesome to help you practice getting 'the shot', balancing settings, zoom, position and a lot of things happening at once. If you go shoot a mate's game, you'll be in their good books for a while - sports shots make great facebook profile pictures ;)

Good luck!

Cheers
Tal

Photo Disect - Long Exposure Movement

Here I'll be disecting two basic types of long exposure photography - one where the background is steady but the subject is moving, and one where the subject is steady and the background moving. Both of these especially convey movement, and will give different effects depending on the subject and technique involved. Here are the shots I've chosen:


The first is a very cool moving shot of some scooters in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. The shot for me sums up the extremely hectic pace of the city and its constant traffic. One of the scooters is pin sharp with the background of the shot in motion blur. This kind of shot is fantastic for conveying speed and chaos. What you have to do to get this kind of shot is keep your lens pointed directly at the moving target. You may need to take 10 shots in a row to get a sharp one, but it will be worth it. I usually work these types of shots at a shutter speed between 1/4 of a second and 1/50th of a second depending on how fast the subject is travelling and how long your lens is.

This shot, I was shooting on Tv (Shutter speed priority) at 1/20th of a second, ISO100. This shutter speed was fast enough that I could expect my subject to be sharp, but slow enough to show lots of movement. Have a try yourself! Set your camera on shutter speed priority mode, ISO100, and work between 1/4 and 1/50th tracking and shooting cars as they go past and see what results you can get. This technique is very interesting and popular as it really stands out.

As for the second photo, this is working with a very similar concept but in a different way. You will need a tripod for this method. This shot keeps a still background with your subject a blurry moving object in the foreground. I was standing across from the opera house close to sunset getting shot after shot, the same boring view, and wanted to get something different. Instead of waiting for the ferries to go pass before I took a photo, I decided to try to include them. A regular snapshot would just have the ferry looking stationary in front of the opera house - it would just make me look like an amateur! So I thought the ferries might look good in motion skimming across the water in front of the opera house instead - it would be less distracting and would show off the movement that occurs so constantly in the harbour.

The ferries weren't going as fast as the scooter, and I had a tripod to keep the shot stable so I decided to go for a longer shutter speed of about 3 seconds. I was shooting my lens at 35mm, I connected my remote shutter to my camera and waited for the moment that two ferries were about to pass each other exactly in front of the opera house. I hit the button, the camera did its thing, and voila! There was a few attempts before and after this one, but it came out the best.

Neither of these had any editing done apart from a simple levels (brightness/contrast) adjustment.

So you can see the kind of cool results that are possible shooting longer exposure times to show movement. Whichever option you choose will be dependent on your environment and what you are trying to shoot.

Good luck!

Cheers
Tal

Photo Disect - Event Photography

Event photography, in my opinion, is pretty much the perfect place to start out for someone with an SLR looking to learn how to use it properly. It gives you a fun environment to practice with ambient light and shutter speed, and with so much happening, you find yourself learning how to change settings quickly - which is very important.

Saying that, I think it's easy for people to be bogged down and typecast into an event shooter. Yes, you're the life of the party and your photos are a hit on facebook but trust me, after a year everyone is pretty much over it (especially you) so in the meantime you should be getting into landscapes, portraits, urban shots, anything else etc as much as possible so you have some skills to go on from when the events are getting boring.

This is not to say that events aren't a great source of revenue - they really can be, I still shoot up to 10 events a week for great rates (30-80 per hour). I just think that you shouldn't be putting all your photographic energy into shooting your friends' birthdays (yes, 'photographic energy' does exist, by day 12 on my road trip I was really really sick of shooting).

Call me cynical, but I won't shoot events these days if they're not paid. It's not hugely difficult to find paid jobs - it's more of a social thing, the more people know that you're a photographer, the more interest you will get. I was lucky to be able to start off with getanightlife, but if you get some decent event shots in a little portfolio on facebook or a website you can start from there.

Anyway, now to the photo. There are literally thousands and thousands of photos I could use as examples here, but I'll just show you a nice one that I got last night:


The best thing about this photo is that it's not edited! Event photography is a discipline where you'll be getting loads and loads of images, so you won't be wanting to go through and individually or even batch edit 200 shots every time you shoot an event (cough cough romanceinmypants).

There's a few simple bits of gear you'll need to shoot events.
Any DSLR - I have a Canon 450D
A mid-range zoom - I have a Canon 17-85mm but a cheap kit lens will do just fine.
A speedlite flash - You might think it's too expensive, but these flashes are crucial. May as well get one and learn how to use it now, and you'll be reaping the benefits for years to come.
A flash diffuser - I've linked that to an ebay auction - these are about 5 dollars and extremely handy. Best 5 dollars ever spent - just make sure you buy one that fits your flash.

There's a few simple things you'll need to do to shoot an indoor event.

Attach the speedlite to the top of the camera, and place the flash diffuser on the end. Sometimes it's a snug fit, but mine is a bit loose so I just use duct tape to keep it in place. Tilt the flash head up 45 degrees and turn it on auto. This is what it should look like:

Turn the camera on to its manual setting. Set the aperture to its lowest f/number (should be about 3.5 or 4). Set the camera to ISO 400. Shoot on JPEG, with a +2 saturation if possible (tutorial here). Once you have all this, you're pretty much set. All you have to worry about now is composition and shutter speed. This will depend on the amount of ambient light, and I will usually go between 1/2 of a second and 1/50th of a second. I would be using 1/2 (looks like 0"5 on the camera) at a dark club, 1/6th at a bar with a few lights around, 1/20th in a normally lit room and 1/50th in a bright indoor room. The beauty of digital is that you can just try out different speeds and see what looks best on the screen. You should be aiming to have an even lighting of subject and background. This is why you need to shoot manual, on auto, the camera will just choose 1/60th and your subjects will just be in front of a boring black backdrop (cough cough romanceinmypants).

The photo example here was shot in front of a decently lit bar at 1/5th of a second. The camera and flash diffuser set at 45 degrees did the rest.

So getting the lighting right isn't too hard, and you'll be able to master it pretty easily after a little practice. You still have to worry about composition though! Event photography is usually something that really doesn't benefit from empty space. I love to fill the frame with people, it looks great. I try to get heads about 1/4 of the photo from the top, and fill the remainder with body. I usually shoot portait (vertical) with 1 or 2 people, and landscape (horizontal) for 3 or more. I also find its much more attractive to shoot on your lens' widest setting (mine's 17mm) and get pretty close in to the subjects, rather than standing further away and zooming in. Shooting like this, the flash will do a much better job and it gives the photos better perspective.

So there you have it! Follow these instructions and you should be able to get great event shots straight off of your camera, no editing required. The diffuser cap is great for softening the shots and an absolute must-have, especially at $5!

Good luck.

Cheers,
Tal