Shooting intense action, stunts and sports is very much like shooting birds in flight. You need luck, fast fingers and a keen eye that predicts more than it sees. You can’t capture the goal keeper diving up and hanging in midair with the ball just slipping past him if you can’t predict a goal is going to be attempted. Commercial photography also asks for good compositions and copy space, which make it even more challenging. You need not always struggle for compositions because you could crop it later, but the higher the size, better it is.
Where to Be
Your placement also makes a great difference. Shooting from the middle of the crowd with a 200mm lens would never give you the unique action shot you want. People are used to seeing sports from that angle, sitting in the stadium. You need to change the angle to something rare and unusual. If you’re shooting from the front row of a stadium you’re more likely to have the blurs of audience in the background which is a very good background for a sports stock photo. Aim to get as low on the ground as possible. Or get directly ahead somehow! Some stadiums have maintenance walkways at great heights and if you get some staff member to trust you, you could get up there for near vertical shots of the action.
If you’re going to get the glare of stadium lights in the background, you could end up with that perfect shot with shiny light and cheering audience in the background and the player in the front. These are some of the appealing compositions I have outlined.
The Proper Equipment
Choice of equipment does make a difference. Having a telephoto lens with a wide aperture is very helpful. You can’t capture intensely high speed action with a maximum aperture of f/5.6 without stepping up your ISO to 1600 or probably even higher, which gives serious noise. I prefer using a telephoto zoom lens for sports and unpredictable action because fixed focal length lenses cause some inconvenience if I want to take in bigger parts of the field. Zoom lenses also let you create beautiful zoom blurs. Overuse of zoom blur isn’t advised for stock photography. Use a lens hood. Stadium lighting can affect contrast of photos if you don’t use a lens hood to protect from unwanted diagonal light sources.
So you have only two options - to shoot in bright lighting or to shoot using expensive equipment. In extreme cases, you could resize photos to reduce effect of noise if you don’t have a very good noise performance DSLR. Don’t use “bicubic sharper” algorithm (in Photoshop) for resizing as it usually retains noise. Wide aperture goes without saying. You’ll need the widest you’ve got.
Shutter Lag
Shutter lag is another annoyance as it would make you lose your potentially perfect photos. If your camera has settings to delay capture after the actual shutter button depression, better switch it off. Do the needful so that the camera shows a minimum reaction time.
Switch to servo AF or AI (smart) auto focus mode which assists fast focusing. Try to keep the head in focus at all times. A tripod isn’t very important. But it still helps to have something to support your equipment on, which steadies up your long lens and you’d find it easier to not lose your subject. You could also try some 1/80 s shots when there is intense action in a specific part. For example, someone swinging a golf club…you can blur out the action while you get a reasonably steady overall photo.
Finally, I’d like to say that it always pays to have a friend with you who’s a big fan of the sports you’re trying to capture. It significantly increases your chances of getting that perfect shot. Your concentration would be on the camera. Have your friend watch out the overall situation and tell you of something interesting about to happen. That makes sure you have an eye everywhere and make the best of every good situation.
Pratik Panda is a professional stock photographer. He contributes his work to Dreamstime stock photography and blogs about photography in the Dreamstime community. His portfolio can be viewed at http://www.dreamstime.com/robinstockphotos_info.
