I also have a wide variety of friends who have kids active in sports, and who ask me to take pictures of their kids doing the things they do – which include sports. When you tote a camera everywhere, people assume you take pictures “everywhere”.

I was also fortunate enough to have the opportunity to serve as the Digital Media Director, responsible for photography and videography, for the U.S. Deaflympics Team at the recent Deaflympics in Taipei, Taiwan. (See the photos here.)

My goal with the next several articles is to help the budding sports photographer (or the involunteered sports photographer) get better pictures. In my experience, it usually takes two to three games of shooting before you learn the tempo of that particular game, and learn where to stand to improve your odds of getting a better shot. With proper instruction and guidance, my hope is that you will be walking away with keepers on the very first game.

Here’s the sports that I’ve covered

• Volleyball (court and beach)
• Basketball
• Football (American)
• Swimming
• Athletics (track and field)

General guidelines about Gear

First, you don’t need the latest Canon 1D Mark III, Mark IV, or the Nikon D3, D300 to shoot good sports pictures. Yes, these cameras have features that make it easier to handle a wide range of situations that you may encounter – especially low-light situations. These cameras have remarkable high ISO capabilities, which can provide action-freezing photos when there’s not a lot of light bouncing around.

The interesting conundrum is that the better the schools, the better lighting they’re going to have in the gymnasiums and on the field – so the less likely you are to need the high ISOs. Smaller schools with smaller budgets are going to have darker gymnasiums, less powerful lights on the football field, etc. You might want to consider auxiliary lighting for these situations. (We’ll talk about that, too.)

If all else fails – consider renting additional gear for those special occasions. My local rental shop will let me pick up rental gear on Friday afternoon after 2:00, and as long as I deliver it Monday morning before noon, they only charge me for a single day’s rental. If you can bundle up and cover several events that weekend, then it’s worth it. I’d also like to put in a plug for Lens Rentals (www.lensrentals.com) — they were one of our sponsors for the Deaflympics, and they did an amazing job of meeting our needs.

Camera Settings

Most action photos should be taken with a shutter speed of at least 1/125^th of a second, and preferably even faster. Image Stabilized lenses (or VR, for the Nikon shooters) will help a lot. The manufacturers claim a 2 to 3 stop improvement with IS. This means that an image stabilized lens shooting at 1/125^th will (should) deliver a picture as sharp as a non-IS lens shooting at 1/500^th.

Depending on the venue and the lighting, I set my camera on either Manual, or Aperture Priority. If the lighting is even across my entire field of view (indoor court sports, for example, or a cloudy overcast day outside), then it’s Manual. If I find that there are wide variations in the lighting across my field of view (for example, if I’m shooting outside sports and half the field is in the sun, and half is in shadow) then I’ll set it to Av.

My aperture is usually as wide as I can go – f/2.8. Sometimes I have better luck with 4.0, if I find that the players are moving very fast relative to my position.

What this means is that a player might be moving down the court or field very quickly – but if they are moving perpendicular to me, then a narrow aperture is going to result in a sharp picture, because they are staying within the narrow “zone” of focus as I pan the camera from side to side.

If they are moving quickly towards me (a basketball player driving down the court, or a football player rushing) then I will consider going to a 4.0 for two reasons – with the greater depth of field, I am more likely to get them to be sharp in the picture, and when I am in a position where they are coming directly at me, the background usually is much farther away than if I am perpendicular to the action, so a f/4.0 aperture is still going to result in a nicely bokeh-ed background. An example of this might be standing past the end zone in football, looking for that oncoming rush through the line of scrimmage, or being at the end of the court in basketball, looking for that drive down the line.

If you only have variable aperture lenses (typically these are the lenses that come with consumer and prosumer grade cameras) that vary between f/3.5 and f/5.6 – then you have to make some sacrifices. You can shoot aperture priority, open it up as wide as possible, and let the camera set the shutter speed, or you can shoot in manual, with a constant aperture of f/5.6. Having the constant aperture of f/2.8 is why professional photographers buy the expensive lenses – they let in more light, and allow faster shutter speeds with lower light situations.

You should set your ISO to be as low as possible, while still having a shutter speed fast enough to freeze the action. It’s a delicate balancing act. I’ve shot indoor basketball with a Canon 30D, f/2.8 lenses, at 1000 ISO, and gotten good pictures. This was with crappy tungsten lighting in the gym, no strobes. When I’ve had to bump it up to ISO 1250, 1600, the quality of the pictures took a noticeable nose dive.

Most photography books will advise you to “expose to the right” – bumping your exposure up against the right side of the histogram. In sports, I’ve found that sometimes by purposely underexposing my pictures by a stop (or even two) results in increased saturation in the photos, and allows the shutter speed to be quicker – resulting in a sharper photo. Yes, I lose detail in the shadows – but I get the shot. These are your choices: is it better to get a perfectly exposed blurry photo, or an underexposed photo (that I can bring back in post-processing) that is sharp? I prefer sharp.

It might seem obvious, but it bears repeating, you should be shooting RAW at all times. If you want to shoot RAW+JPEG, that’s fine – but those sharp underexposed photos are going to be easier to bring back to acceptable exposure levels in RAW than in JPEG.

My camera also has three different focusing modes: single shot, AI Focus, and AI Servo. Here are my thoughts on each one:

Single Shot: Total control. I can predict the action, pre-focus on a certain point (if I turn off autofocusing) and when I pull the trigger, I get the shot. The downside is that if it’s on autofocus and the subject is moving quickly, then I sometimes get a blurry photo.

AI Servo: This is great for photos of fast-moving subjects. The camera will “predict” where the subject is going to be when the shutter pops, and pre-focus to that point. The problem for me is that I use single-point focusing most of the time. The combination of single-point focusing and AI Servo means that the subject must be centered in the shot – every time. This often results in static, boring photos.   I would rather have some space around the subject – space ahead of a running football player, for example. By using single point auto focus, the camera will focus on something off in the distance, and I miss the shot.

AI Focus: This is supposed to be a combination of the two – it works like Single shot until the subject starts moving, then it will go into servo mode. My issues with these are the same as above – I like to choose my composition.

Auxiliary Lighting

If you find that you cannot get sharp pictures with the constraints of your camera, your lenses, the ISO capabilities of your camera, and the amount of light in the venue, it’s time to consider adding lights.   Most of us cannot afford to rewire a gymnasium or a football field with additional spotlights, so we need to use strobes.

I was talking with the Superintendent of the school where my kids go (The Maryland School for the Deaf, in Frederick, MD), and he was asking me about how the photos were going for the Homecoming football game. It was a night game – and the field was rather dark. It was misting, not quite raining, so I wasn’t about to bring out battery packs and strobes. (In my experience, water and electricity are not a good combination.) On top of that, the home team was wearing black uniforms. As a result, the pictures were not as good as I would have liked. The field had 4 large poles with lights (not bad for a high school) – but I told him we needed to put up an additional four to six light poles in order to get really good pictures, and I asked him when he’d be able to work that out.

“Sure, Bill, so you can get better pictures of your son playing football, yep, I’ll just slip that in the budget as a line item for next year, I think a million will cover it, we’ll see how it works out.” (I did point out that I was getting pictures of ALL the boys playing, but I still didn’t get a warm fuzzy feeling that the light towers were going to be in place for next year’s Homecoming football game. But, I digress.)

If you do need auxiliary lighting in the form of strobes, there are two ways to go – battery powered, and AC (wall) powered. I have used speedlights (the small battery powered flashes typically seen on-camera, but I use them off-camera) as well as AC powered strobes – I have Alien Bee strobes. I also have a Vagabond II, which turns the AC-powered Alien Bee flashes into portable battery-powered strobes. Portability is a big deal with me, and the work I normally do.

For more information on lighting gymnasiums, there’s the Strobist website, with articles here, here and here:

• http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/04/on-assignment-prep-basketball.html

• http://strobist.blogspot.com/2007/02/on-assignment-speedlighting-college-gym.html

• http://strobist.blogspot.com/2007/03/q-speedlighting-gym.html

David does a far better job of teaching off-camera lighting than I could. I strongly recommend starting with his Lighting 101 series, and then branching out into the more esoteric applications, like sports.

When you read the articles, make sure you read the comments — sometimes there is a lot of additional information in the comments, pointers to other articles, etc.

Access to the Best Places to Shoot

I’m assuming that you’re shooting elementary through high school sports or perhaps a smaller college or university, where access to the venue is not a problem. If you’re in a Big Name High School, College, or University, then you may not be able to get on the court, or on the field.

One thing I’ve found that helps with access is to make friends with the Athletic Director (AD) of the school, as well as the coaches of the various teams. Approach them during quiet times (Note: 10 minutes before the game starts is not an ideal time), and explain that you’re interested in shooting pictures of their teams. If you offer to provide the pictures back to the teams – for publicity purposes, for the school yearbook, for the walls of the AD or the coach, then you’re much more likely to get the access that you want.

A free print here and there is a remarkable application of grease to the political machinery. Especially when Costco now has 20×30 prints of spectacular quality for $8.99! One of those gracing the AD’s door will go a long way.

Post-processing

One thing about shooting sports – you’re going to have a LOT of photos when you get done. I highly recommend that you find some way to sort and manage all these photos. I use Adobe Lightroom to manage the files, and do most of my post-processing. Others use Photo-Mechanic, Bridge, etc.

The reason I chose Lightroom was because it was able to manage the files, AND do rudimentary edits. Over the years that I’ve been using it, they have added more and more features to LR – so that now I rarely go into Photoshop at all. The adjustment brushes are an awesome feature that allow you to quickly dodge and burn. As of the writing of this article, Lightroom 3 Beta is available for free – check it out.

Additional resources

• Matt Kloskowski’s blog on LR – http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/
• Gene McCullagh’s LR site – http://lightroomsecrets.com/

Delivery of the Images

One thing you do not want to do is to become a CD duplication house. By this, I mean that everybody that sees you taking photos on the sidelines is going to assume that your pictures are easily duplicated and deliverable on CD. Yes, they are … but I’m not in the CD duplication business. Yes, it only takes 5 minutes to burn a CD – but it takes longer to do all the work leading up to that point, and to deliver the CD.

So, when people say, “Can you?”   I say, “I don’t, sorry.”

I use Smugmug as a delivery platform and print sales manager. I go through my photos, and I upload them to Smugmug.   I then send out an email to all the parents whose emails I have, I drop a line in my Facebook, I might blog a few selects and then point to the rest.

After that, the parents are free to go in and order what they like. I do watermark the images, and I do allow medium-sized web downloads for free. This may or may not cut into my print sales – but I’d rather have the advertising out there than spend all my time chasing people who copy/paste illegally off the website.

There are other alternatives to Smugmug – I use it because I’ve been using it, if you know what I mean.

Last, I want to give a shout out to the folks at Sportsshooter.com – who have a huge number of helpful articles, videos, etc. – designed to help the professional sports shooter.

Subsequent articles will focus on the various individual sports; next up is volleyball and basketball.

If you have questions, experiences, or additional tips – leave them in the comments!

One of the blogs I read all the time is the Strobist blog (www.strobist.com). David Hobby has been writing this blog for a while now, and I have learned lots from him.

One of the great things he did when he got started was he realized that it was not going to be possible for him to answer every question, or respond to every comment. So, being the innovative person that he is, he started a flickr forum that allows various photographers from all over the world to learn, share and teach one another.

That forum is here:   http://www.flickr.com/groups/strobist/

Recently on this flickr forum there was a review and discussion about the Kacey Beauty Dish. Musician/photographer Steve Korn apparently got one to play with, and offered his opinions in a well-written review here.

I was lucky enough to be able to play with one of these beauty dishes (Kacey calls them “Beauty Reflectors”) recently, and took it on several different shoots.

First up was a high school senior prom. I had the idea of suspending the beauty dish over some people who were dancing, to see what I could get. What ended up happening was I got this really cool circle of light:

I think it’s a little overexposed – but the concept is really cool. Definitely something I’d like to experiment with more.

The following day I was shooting family portraits outside – it was a volunteer gig for military families on active duty. Some had family members serving overseas, they wanted to send portraits of themselves and the kids. I found a shady spot under a big tree, and set up the beauty dish on a lightstand and just used it as a big directional light. It worked out great – a fairly wide spread at about 15 feet back with no flare into my lenses.

The big advantage here was that the light was very stable, even though it was windy. If I’d used just a speedlight or even a bare monolight, it would have been less flattering on the subjects. If I’d used an umbrella, I would have gotten my exercise chasing it across the field when the wind decided to take it away from me. Alternatively, it could have come crashing down on the subjects – the spouse and offspring of people who have guns and know how to use them. Not smart. The beauty dish was stable throughout the shoot, and I had absolutely no problems.

I also got the chance to experiment with it as a fill flash in full sun:

On Saturday and Sunday, May 9 and 10, Don Giannatti (wizwow on flickr) came out from Phoenix and gave his Lighting Essentials workshop here in Frederick, MD. So, a whole bunch of us got to play with the beauty dish that weekend.

Here’s some shots from that:

I decided to put together a little video, demonstrating how easy this thing is to use. Note that this is a “quick and dirty” video – I did not spend a lot of time on polishing the fine points here. I also had a head cold, which stuffed my nose, drives my voice up a few notches, and in places I sound like Daffy Duck. I was standing in a wide-open farm field, that was very windy, and there was a storm coming in behind the camera, so the sound quality is not up to studio standards. Your understanding is appreciated in advance.

Final shot from the video:

In conclusion – Jerry Kacey – I’m keeping this!

I am a huge fan of the light that comes from a white shoot-through umbrella. It flatters almost everybody, and it is fairly easy to control in terms of power. It does, however, have three major problems:

1. If the umbrella is close to the viewpoint of the camera, I cannot have the umbrella be closer to the subject than my lens. I get flare across my lens. So, I am limited to the combination of using lenses and umbrella distances that work together.
2. Umbrellas often do not do well in social situations – they fall over, and they have large skewer points just waiting for the errant eyeball to come into close proximity.
3. Umbrellas do not do well outside. Even the slightest breeze turns the whole thing into a sail, and I have already broken a pocket wizard, a speedlight, AND an umbrella by having it overturned in the wind.

The Kacey Beauty Reflector has none of these problems. There is no spill out the back; they are smaller, yet yield a similar quality of light. They do not blow over in the wind.

Two thumbs up. This is a keeper.

I was also working against ambient light coming into the room from camera left through a large sliding glass door. It was very shady and overcast outside, so this light had a very bluish cast. So, I decided to overpower the ambient, and use all strobes to light the scene. (As a quick aside – if you are uncomfortable using strobes, or just want to get better, head over to www.strobist.com for the low-down and the high-up on how to use strobes with your camera. David Hobby is the guy writing that, and he’s got an online tutorial, a DVD set, a matching flickr forum, and more.)

Here’s a lighting diagram of my concept:

You see the “brick wall” along the background – that’s actually the only option I had for selecting a background for this particular lighting tool. You can find the tool over at Lighting Essentials, a really great site run by Don Giannatti.

I also interchange a white shoot-through umbrella with a softbox, depending on what I’ve got with me that day. For the baby, below, I had a white shoot-through.

We are lighting this shot on two separate planes – the background, and the foreground. With space between them, we can totally control the amount of light on each plane. We can have a very bright background, and a dark foreground. We have have the opposite: a dark background, and a bright foreground. We can also balance the two. In this case, I want the foreground to be slightly brighter than the background.

Ok, so we take the first shot, of just the picture of Jesus in the background. I put a snoot on the back speedlight (a Nikon flash – I shoot with Canon bodies, but my off-camera flashes are Nikon – if they are off-camera, the brand doesn’t matter).

That gave me this:

	That’s not bad, but it’s not quite bright enough. Let’s up the power a stop, from 1/8 to 1/4. That gives us:
	Much better in terms of exposure, but the lighting is a little harsh along the right hand side. I don’t like the hard edge. Let’s back it up a wee bit, and aim it slightly to the right – that way the hard edge is outside of the frame of my photo.
	This is perfect. Nice hazy edge all the way around, still a bit underexposed, but that’s what I want. Now let’s start working on the foreground.
	This is my “model” standing in, so you can see what the shot looks like without any light on the foreground. It’s mostly a silhouette. Now let’s add the foreground light – another speedlight with a white shoot-through umbrella off to camera left.
	That’s actually pretty good – he’s a little “hot” (a bit overexposed) along his forehead, but he’s higher in the picture than my actual subject is going to be. Hmm. We should try this with an actual subject, and see what it looks like. Since the baby was sleeping, and we didn’t want to risk moving the baby until it was absolutely necessary, we found a similar-sized stand-in:
	That actually looks pretty good. Still a bit hot along the forehead of the bear, so I backed up the light a wee bit. I also knew that baby skin reflects differently than bear fur, so I wanted to see what the actual baby looked like before I fussed with it too much. You’ll notice that the background is a little bit lighter because of spill from the umbrella. That’s fine – I don’t have a lot of room between the subject and the background, so I just have to live with it. If I had more distance between the two, I could control that better.
	Hmm, ok, the forehead is still a bit hot. I guess baby skin and bear fur share some similar photonic properties. Let’s reduce the power of the light. I don’t want to back the light up any more away from the “baby”, because I want the big wraparound effect of that shoot-through umbrella.
	And there we go. Parents were delighted. A little dodging and burning in Lightroom, and it’s ready to go. (This shot is straight out of camera.) This recipe – light the background, then work on the foreground, is something I use again and again.

Once you have a lighting recipe, and :

• you know the basic ratios of front light to back light power (in this case, the back light was at 1/8 power with a snoot, front light was 1/4)
• what aperture is going to match these for optimum results (remember that aperture controls flash exposure, while shutter speed controls ambient)
• use a stand-in before picking up the baby. Repeated strobing causes cranky babies. (Ask me how I know this.)

Just follow the recipe, predictable results.