Express Action Sports

Tomorrow I will be taking pictures of high school wrestling indoors in a gym and soccer on an outdoor field. I have the Nikon D40 with18-55mm and 55-200mm lenses and I was wondering what settings I should use to take the best pictures for both sports.

Wrestling.

You’ll want to position yourself so you can shoot from a low angle, particularly when the wrestlers are on the mat. Frame your subject tightly and just keep shooting. What you are looking for is facial expressions which convey the stress of the struggle to those that view your images. I would suggest you use the telephoto lens. I would also suggest you use a flash as well; most gyms are poorly lit using florescent tubes, creating flat top lighting conditions.

Soccer

That will definitely require the use of the telephoto lens and to tell you the truth, 200 mm isn’t big enough. It can be done. You’ll want to move along the sidelines with the motion of the game, shooting only the action on the side from which you are standing. Action on the other side of the field will be too far way for a 200 mm to capture with good resolution.

Look for action where two players are battling for the ball. You can also position yourself to get shots of the goalie making saves. The key thing is to anticipate the action. If you see the image you want through the viewfinder, you’ve missed the shot.

I recently bought a telephoto lens for my digital DSLR to take better pictures of action shots in sports. I am using a 75-300 mm lens. The problem is that in order to freeze the motion, I need a fast shutter speed, resulting in dark pictures. Can anyone recommend a shutter speed that freezes motion but still gets enough light to have brighter pictures or just another tip to help with my picture-taking? Please help me.

You may want to try raising the ISO settings before adjusting the shutter speed. Definately get the ISO as high as you can before a noticable grain appears. Often, the ISO is set very low for a ‘cleaner’ picture, but this means lower sensitivity to light. So try raising it slowly.

You may want to spend an entire sports event taking test pictures, tweaking serttings between shots, then back at home review your images using a image browser that shows all the EXIF data stored in the photo, which reveals your ISO and shutter speeds. Adobe Lightroom, ACDSee, even Microsoft has put out a free add in for Windows to expose this extra EXIF info in the photo.

You will want to preview the test images large, to notice subtle differences, the preview screen on the camera is not enough to see blur most the time if your speed is a hair too low..

I would be glad to tell you a magic setting, but im not sure it exists, more that you know a general range of shutter speed and iso speed that works, and constantly adjust according to the specific area.

Here is a newer, free microsoft photo viewer that may be of use http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/downloads/tools.aspx

I have a Canon EOS Digital Rebel with an 18-55 mm lens. I want to get a lens that will get me closer to the action for sports photos for example. I also will be using it for landscapes and other outdoor photos.

Your 18-55mm lens is a zoom lens, all it means is that the lens has a variable focal length between X and Y.

A telephoto lens is one that is greater focal length than the "normal" lens for a particular type of camera. On a 35mm, that is anything more than 50mm. On a 645 or 6X6, that is anything greater than an 80mm.

On your Digital Rebel with the 1.6x crop factor, it is anything greater than about 35mm. Your 18-55 is actually a short telephoto, with an equivalent field of view of approximately 29-88mm as compared to a 35mm camera.

What you can get to fulfill your need varies mostly with your budget. The Canon 75-300 III is the least expensive method to get a lot more reach, but is also the worst option. Better, yet still fairly low cost, is the Sigma 70-300 APO. Make sure it is the APO version, there are several.

Upping the budget a little, there is the Canon 55-250 IS, supposed to be a pretty good lens.

For another step up in price, there is the Canon 70-300 IS, which is an image stabilized version of the lens, but is a much better lens to begin with. For only a little more, you can get the Canon 70-200 f/4 L, a constant aperture zoom. Anything with an L in the name is a good lens. Even the 28-300 IS, even though it costs $2,300.

Im looking to buy a lens mainly for taking shots of waterskiing and wakeboarding and ill be taking the shots from the boat. the rope is about 50-60ft so I would like to know what telephoto lens would be good for under $600.

In situations like that I prefer to have a variable zoom lens. It takes a hit on the f stop but the advantage of not changing lenses while bouncing in a boat with spray coming over the bow, makes it worth it to me. Not knowing what camera you have makes it difficult to be too specific. Depending on your sensor chip size the effective lens size will vary. In the 35mm world a decent 75-300 should fall well within your budget. Now if you have 2 bodies I’d like to set up one with a fixed 75 and a fixed 300 on the other – Just my preference I’m sure others will chime in with theirs.

Attached is a link with photo tips for wakeboards

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.