Express Action Sports

I have a Canon Rebel T3. I take a lot of sports pictures mostly basketball and volleyball so indoor sports. I have a 18-55mm lens and a 75-300mm lens.. I usually use the 75-300 and I get really good pictures! but I was wondering if there are better lens’ for sports that wont cost more then around 200 dollars or so. thanks so much! or any tips on getting better indoor sports pictures would be great too!

There’s really no good lens you can buy for $200. Unfortunately, the price is everything when it comes to lens. For fast action, you need a lens with a large aperture. Unfortunately, the larger the aperture, the more expensive, exponentially. Check out the pros with those bazooka style lens, that what it takes to freeze the action from far away. But those will cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

What you can do is try to get closer to the action, that way you don’t have to zoom as much. Also, try to pan with the action. With enough practice, you can actually get a nice focus shot of a moving object. So like when a basketball player jumps up diagonally, pan your camera in the same direction. You can get some cool effects with the player being in focus and the background blurred.

Hope this helps,
-Wei
www.artofwei.com

Trying to take photos of my sons basketball game. There is enough light to take without a flash but on auto setting, images are blurry. When i set to manual mode and a fast shutter speed there doesn’t appear to be enough light. Wondering if I need a bigger flash or different settings.

David Hobby from the Baltimore Sun has a great short description of a simple technique including two flash units and remote triggers here.
There is another great source for sports in general by Jerry Lodriguss, see here for more.

In principle you want a shutter speed shorter than 1/200. Use a fast lens, get close to the action. Set your white balance to custom and use a grey card to take a shot that allows the camera to evaluate the white balance. This saves endless time tweaking it later.

Football, Basketball, Soccer, Hockey, Water polo
Sports that use a lot of running and some physical contact.

~AtA~

The Kobe Bryant scandal and the Michael Vick scandal didn’t really affect the image of the sports of basketball and football, respectively – their actions brought repercussions on themselves at a personal level.

But golf is different than those sports – it has more of a gentlemanly and classy image. So, will this Tiger Woods scandal bring down the sport of golf in a way? Or, do you think that it’ll be the same as Kobe and Vick scandals, in that it won’t affect the image of the sport of golf?

Tiger Woods can learn from Michael Jordan. First, he needs to quit golf, but then a year later come back. Then he needs to quit again, try to play hockey, and after that fails play golf again with a different sponsor

First of all I am a PHD user of cameras (Push Here Dummy) (I don’t want to deal with changing of lenses, focusing, backlighting, etc.) I have 2 kids in sports (soccer, gymnastics, basketball & football). They are often far away in the middle or on the other side of the field and of course in action! I want to be able to take quality CLOSE UP pictures with PHD function – good, fast, self-focusing zoom function an absolute must, and multiple fast repeating shots. So what are the best ones out there – I am not made of money so I would like to stay well under $1,000 while maintaining quality of picture and product performance. Anyone who has the experience to advise on what the aspects are to consider with regard to zoom capabilities/multi-frame shots and/or pinpoint a couple of selections would be greatly appreciated. (We have 7.0 mega pixel purse size camera, but its zoom while O.K. for nearby photos is O.K. just won’t cut it for the sports!)

Unfortunately, the only cameras that can truly catch any action shots are exactly what you said you do not want. A DSLR camera with interchangeable lenses is really the only cameras that don’t have perceptible shutter lag. I know of no point and shoot camera that does not have shutter lag from a half second or worse.

DSLR cameras are really modified film cameras so all the digital image related maters are dealt with after the sensor is exposed. Point and shoot cameras do a whole list of things after you press the shutter release and before the exposure is actually made.

Extreme sports are a popular twist to conventional team sports like basketball, baseball and football; celebrate your favorite trickster by throwing them an X Games Party!

The first step in throwing an X Games party is to decide whether or not to focus on one event or celebrate the entire category of X Games. Does the child prefer skateboarding to doing bike tricks? If so, use one event as the theme, and use the remaining games as a backdrop to support your theme.

For more information on extreme sports games click here