At some point in our life we have all been inspired by a image of sport. From Tim Montgomery obliteration the competition in the 100mm sprint to Michael Jordan flying threw the air outstretched reaching for the basket.
The Camera
In most forms of photography the equipment isn't too important, you can make do with very little impact on the quality of your photos. for example you don't have to have a £3000 d lite studio set up in order to take good portrait you can make do with a set of general purpose flood lights. How ever the same can't be said for sports photography. As I'll go on to explain in location In sports you are always limited to how close you can get. Just how close is defined by the sport, for basket ball you can sit in under the hoop and be able to get good shots from the entire court using something like a 70-200. How ever for football 70-200 is probably going to be too short and you need something like a 300 or even 400mm lens depending on the size of the pitch. A general rule of thumb to work out what lens would be best suited to the situation is on a Full Frame DSLR for every 100mm you add to your focal length you will get about 9m closer to the action.
The other requirement of sports photography is lens speed or to be precise the f stop value, sure you could purchase a 70-300 f5.6-6.3 lens for a couple of hundred pounds, but come half 8 at night in mid december when the football match is in full swing thats not going to be able to let enough light in to give you a high enough shutter speed to freeze the action, resulting in very blurry pictures!
I’ve mentioned what’s important in a good sports lens the other key part of a camera is the body in the days of film (back in the dark ages) most medium to pro end bodies were nearly equal, how ever since the advent of digital things are not quite as easy a good sports camera needs two things good Auto Focus speed so it can easily lock on and track fast moving objects in low light levels and also High ISO sensitivity with low noise levels. Its fine having a camera that can shoot at iso 12600 but if the image look like a multi colors snow storm its not going to be much good ! Also features like weather sealing and a high frame rate are a bonus but not a must have.
If you was looking to go pro and needed a shopping list something like the following would get you started
1dmkiii @2,400 x 2 = 4800
400mm f2.8 l is = 4889
70-200 f2.8 l is = 1299
16-35f2.8 l = 1119
Grand total =£12107
That would get you started how ever most full time sports photography will have substantially more equipment that that listed above. Ok so an amateur could get buy with less but it wouldn't be the ideal set up.
Lighting
Lighting or should I say bad lighting is the bain of my life there is never the perfect light it is always a compromise too much grey sky giving dull drab images and direct sunlight giving harsh contrasty shadows but it gets even worse than just the odd bit of cloud the uk’s passion of football is played through the winter during the rain, snow and wind (why they don’t play the summer I don’t know) meaning that allot of the games are played under dark skies and flood lights. This is where high ISO and low F stops pay off as for most no Premiership pitches the pitch is just about bright enough for the players to see the ball which equates to about 3200 f2.8 1/200th of a second which in sports terms is slow. Flash is a big no no for most sports how ever when you get inside into the realms of basket ball you can get away with mounting strobes in the corners of the room and bouncing the light off the celling the advent of the modern speedlight (canon 580ex nikon sb28 etc) coupled with the ingenious Pocket wizard means you relatively cheaply throw up a flash in opposite corners of the hall and have high power reliable light to work with that doesn’t blind the players.
Part two comming soon !
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1 comment:
Football is played in the winter because back in the days when it was an amateur sport played by people with proper jobs the same teams played cricket in the summer and football in the winter - many modern football teams were once upon a time cricket teams who played football in the winter just to keep fit. The habit stuck as football evolved to become professional
What I can't answer is why in the UK drag racing calendar there is a gaping void over the summer where there is a marginally better chance of it not raining/snowing.
MG.
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