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Tips for Sports Photography

Whether you’re photographing your daughter’s gymnastics debut or your son’s championship baseball game, keeping in mind a few tips for sports photography will help you get the shots you need to create memorable layouts for your scrapbook album.

Before You Begin

Regardless of your level of photography experience, it’s a good idea to spend some time familiarizing yourself with your camera’s instruction manual before taking pictures at a sporting event. Many cameras have settings designed especially for sports photography. You may also want to see if your camera has a “burst” mode that will allow you to capture a series of movements.

Getting Near the Action

Typically, experts recommend that the first tips for sports photography focus on getting to the center of the action. While you can’t walk onto a football field in the middle of the game, shooting from the sidelines is better than trying to take pictures from up in the bleachers.

Additionally, it’s a good idea to get in the habit of taking some portrait shots during sporting events. Shots that show the game as whole are useful in providing the context for a scrapbooking layout, but portraits of one particular athlete in action have much more of an emotional impact.

Scrapbook Tips for Sports Photography

One of the greatest challenges when using a digital camera for sports photography is that many of the lower and middle end cameras have trouble reacting to fast moving situations. To help compensate for this delay, you’ll need to keep in mind a few special tips for sports photography. For example:

• Try to position yourself so that the fastest moving people and objects will be coming directly towards you.
• Set your camera to use the manual focus and pre-focus on where the action will occur. If you don’t know a lot about the sport you are photographing, spend some time researching the game on the Internet before the big day arrives.
• A fast shutter speed helps to “freeze” the action. However, using a slower shutter speed can add a blurring effect that can be used to suggest movement when making artistically inspired scrapbooking projects.
• Using fill flash can help isolate one particular athlete from a busy background.
• When in doubt, shoot wide. While you can always use image editing software to crop your images at a later date, you can’t add in important details such as the top of an athlete’s head!

Practice Makes Perfect

Just as athletes spend years perfecting their skills, a sports photographer requires practice learning how to anticipate what will make a great photo. When you’re photographing sporting events, plan to take many more shots than you expect to need. One survey of professional newspaper photographers found that they take between 20 and 40 photos for every shot that is published. As an amateur photographer, you can’t expect to achieve great results with anything less.

Although not all coaches will allow it, some may not object to you taking pictures during the team’s practice. This can be a great way to work on your photography techniques in a low-pressure environment and boost your confidence for the day of the big game.

Published on 04/15/2008.