Sports photography

[spotty_dog]

Today, DH had a bike race. Knowing that I've sort of tried to educate myself about photography, he thrust his dSLR on me along with a 50 mm lens and a 17(?)-300mm lens. I played around with both, felt totally awkward with the big one, and took some shots of his 5 laps with the smaller one. When he finished I proudly announced, "I used the smaller lens and shutter priority, mostly with 1/180", so I think I captured some good shots." He cringed and said, "That is way too slow for sports shots, and I thought you'd use the big lens so you'd have access to apertures you didn't have with the smaller one. I would have used aperture priority at (5.6? I forget what he said). I guess I should have said something but I thought it was obvious."

D'oh. I'm pretty embarrassed. Though they looked OK in the viewfinder the shots totally have motion blur (and sometimes just terrible focus because I autofocused at one distance then panned the camera to try to get a few chances at capturing him at 20+ mph before he went out of view).

I confess I still don't get aperture beyond shorter depth of field being good for portraits/bokeh, and wider aperture getting more light/better exposure. Someone please school me about the considerations for action shots, before I screw up yet ANOTHER bike race? (I had one last summer at twilight, where he gave me another fancy lens and set the camera up for me in some sort of auto mode, and the shots were horrendous. The portraits I took of the kids that same night were great though...)

[niener]

For shooting sports I actually prefer shutter priority over aperture priority just to make sure my shutter speed doesn't drop below action-freezing. The speed it should be set to depends on the sport. Some sports you can get away with speeds as low as 1/250th, but for a bike race since they're moving so quickly I'm guessing you should start out at least at 1/1000. There should be a way for you to zoom in on the image that you're seeing on the viewfinder -- take a couple of pictures at a certain shutter speed and zoom in as much as you can to see if it's blurry. If it is, up the shutter speed and repeat until you find your minimum speed. You're going to also want a higher ISO as well, I'd guess at least 400 up to 1600 depending on how good your camera is (some cameras get pretty grainy at 1600 so you may not want to go up that high).

Aperture priority is great for creating a shallow depth of field and separating your subject from the background. This can come in handy in sports shooting when you have a distracting background (banners/ads, fencing, crowds, etc). If you decide to shoot aperture priority, pick one of the smaller aperture numbers (5.6 is probably the smallest number on your zoom lens, the 50mm may have smaller) and again set your ISO pretty high so that you can get the fastest shutter speed possible and still freeze the action.

[spotty_dog]

Thanks, I will experiment more when I get a chance!