Tutorial Photographing Outdoor Sport...the COMPLETE guide

Thanks for taking time out to write this guide James. Have taken a lot on board and my captures are getting better (in my opinion), using manual for low light games has proved a winner to get consistent results.
 
got a few questions if you dont mind me asking!

what focal ranges/lenses do you use most often?
how did you get into pro sports togging? what were your first matches ad stuff and how did you progress up to get noticed in pro sports?


great guide! just got them 2 questions unanswered after reading it! :)
 
Great tutorial, thanks.

I've been regularly covering FC United of Manchester since June 2010 (Pre season friendlies seemed a good time to try it), and have even bumped into Kipax a couple of times now.

I tend to set my camera up in advance with slightly different settings for Tv, Av and Manual.

This way, depending on the light, I can flick between settings rather than being fully manual at all times. I also find it helps with the crowd shots.

I tend to prefer using Shutter priority as I too suffer from darker images on Manual.
 
This is a very helpful tutorial. And this helps me a lot also in wakeboard photography. I use 80-200nikon afd mountd on a tripod but i dont normaly get a very crispy shot. What do u think should i do? Thnx
 
Excellent tutorial, I can't wait to put you advice in to action. This an area that interests me greatly.
 
Personally i would scrap the part about spot metering, spot metering is very very accurate and hooped/striped jerseys with high differences in contrast can throw you out all over the place unless youre absolute sure you can handle fully manual shooting, as for recommending shooting at 1/640th sec well thats just plain stupid
 
What would you suggest Gary? I typically set 1/500th sec which seems to work for me.
 
lee said:
What would you suggest Gary? I typically set 1/500th sec which seems to work for me.
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For field sports as fast a SS as the lighting conditions allow given your chosen ISO/Aperture, in summer months i often choose to shoot f/4 ISO 200 (D3S base ISO) which can leave me shooting at anything up to 1/8000th, yes, 1/8000th not 1/800

No one except the OP (who should know better) is suggesting you should shoot at 1/500th sec, what the rest of us are saying is why on earth limit yourself to shooting field sports at 1/500th when 1/1000th, 1/2000th and so on will give you much better results and freeze the action, up the ISO if needed when shooting in dark/floodlit conditions, a grainy photo with the action frozen will always get published over a lower noised image with loads of motion blur/camera shake

Of course this is a generalisation for field sports like footy/rubgy as per the topic but there are times when even a slower shutter speed can produce nice "arty" type images with motion blur particularly if tracking a subject moving across your field of view, and you can even get away with a shutter speed of under 1/500th sec if shooting in a cave if your subject is running directly towards you, the subjects movement toward you has less image blur than one running across you
 
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Thanks Kipax and Gary, reading this and the other thread it now seems so obvious.

I read about the 1/500th quite a while back, and if I think about my photos the ones I am always most happy with are with the guys running toward me, which is now what I'm aiming for and why I've possibly been getting away with it. Shots where I'm panning have not been so good, but I blamed that on poor technique... so in part I've been lazy and sticking to what I've read others doing, and also I've been more worried about noise than I should be, I don't have to worry to much about the aperture with my lens as I can't go any wider :)

Thanks again for the responses.
 
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