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Sports & Action Photography
Think about the challenges you'll be
facing, then set up your equipment
in advance... because great shots take more than just "plain
luck".
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A Day at the Races
The Challenges:
- High-speed motorcycle road racing.
- Subjects traveling up to 150 mph +, weaving & twisting through turns & blasting down straightaways.
- Mixed clouds & bright sun (50/50), constantly changing the lighting conditions.
The Equipment:
- Canon EOS D30 digital camera.
- Canon 100-400mm IS (Image Stabilized) zoom lens with hood.
The Plan:
- Exposure Mode: Aperture
Priority @ f8. Chosen to achieve a reasonable depth of
field without sacrificing shutter speed. (Side note -
most lens tests show that f8 through f11 produce the best
quality pictures.)
- Sensitivity: ISO 400.
While pre-testing shutter speeds at the track on race day
under bright or cloudy conditions at the selected f8
aperture, an ISO 400 setting produced a range of between
1/800th and 1/2000th of a second. (I figured that should
be a fast enough range of speeds to stop the action.)
ISO 200 slowed the shutter speeds by half those amounts, ISO 100 slowed them to one-fourth... much too slow for action photography. And ISO 800 or 1600 would degrade the image quality too much. So I committed myself to ISO 400 for the day.
- Focus Mode: AI Servo.
Selected to have the camera continuously focus while
tracking the subject, regardless of the ever-changing
distances. Half-press the shutter button to engage
continuous focusing, line up on the subject, keep it in
the "cross hairs", and fire away.
- Lens Image Stabilization
Setting # 2 (engineered specifically for horizontal
panning). I knew I'd need all the steadiness I could get
while panning & following the motorcycles through the
viewfinder as they screamed by me.
- Lens hood. Moving the
camera around at different angles in the bright sun, I
didn't want to worry about lens flare problems.
- Shooting Mode: Continuous. (Burst Mode.) The "hold the trigger down and fire away" if desired mode. (You can still snap one at a time in this mode if you want to.)
The Results:
By planning and setting up the camera in advance, I was able to simply "shoot" without having to worry about on-the-fly adjustments. Out of 145 shots taken during a two hour period, I got over 100 good, clean, well-exposed, sharply focused pictures. From there, I got a couple of dozen "keepers", with the kind of action, framing, and composition I was really looking for.
Action! Blasting down the straightaway at over 150 mph.
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And here's a "competitor" shooting some hot closeup action with his Nikon D1.
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