Express Action Sports

I want to take action pictures of field hockey (outdoor) players. I tried a Canon SLR (forgot the model #), didn’t go wide enough. Any pointers to reading materials, or camera makes/models recommendations?
thx

You will need a fast-shooting camera body coupled with fast lenses.

If you’re going Canon, the fastest prosumer dSLR is the Canon 40D. It gives you 10MP quality and shoots at 6.5 fps (frames per second), which should be sufficient for your shooting needs. It retails for about $1000 on Amazon.

As for a good lens for sports shooting, I’d highly recommend the EF 70-200mm f/4L. It’s fast, it has a good zoom range, lightweight, and incredibly sharp. Its large aperture (low f-number) allows more light in and blurs the background to draw more sharpness to the player(s). Best of all, it only costs $450 on Amazon!

You mentioned wide; I guess you want to capture a large spread of players then? If so, and you’re using the 40D, I’d recommend the Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8. It’s also fast, sharp, goes very wide, and has good build quality. It retails on Amazon for $400! I recently bought mine for landscape and photojournalism work, and I’ve loved using it.

Good luck!

I started doing sports photography for the first time yesterday. I’m usually a landscape and architecture photographer, shooting things that generally don’t move a lot, so this was a real challenge to me.
The photos I took can be found here…

Can anyone offer me any constructive criticism or advice on things I could have done differently or better, so I can improve next week?
Thanks.

These are good for working with a point and shoot. I notice you were using aperture priority, try using shutter priority, also I notice you were using an iso of 100, for sports you want to use an iso that is a bit faster. I would start at iso 400. and set the camera on shutter priority and start at 1/250. For sports you really need an slr and a telephoto lens. You can get so much closer with a telephoto lens-This was taken from midway up in the stands.