How To Capture Action

Capturing fast-moving action is essential for sports photography and there are a few things to know before taking on this challenge.

The first thing you need to decide when capturing fast-moving objects is how you want them to appear in your photograph.  In the shot of the bike racer above we wanted to enhance the feeling of speed by blurring the background but there may be cases where you want to freeze the action so that everything is in focus.  The trick to this creative style is choosing your shutter speed appropriately.  The faster your shutter speed, the more you can stop motion - the slower your shutter speed, the more blur you create.

To achieve the shot above, we set our camera to Tv (Shutter Priority) so that we could adjust our shutter speed and let the camera set the aperture automatically.  Normally we would meter the scene with an ambient light meter and shoot in Manual mode but this day was partially overcast and the light values were changing constantly due to the cloudy conditions so we wanted to let the in-camera meter do some of the heavy lifting. We chose to shoot at ISO 200 so that we could reach higher shutter speeds without introducing too much noise. To get the right amount of blur we used trial and error (also knows as "chimping") until we settled on 1/50th. Finding the right speed is a but tricky because if you go too low, it becomes impossible to hold the camera still enough to capture anything sharp. You'll have to experiment a bit to get the right setting.  The camera adjusted the aperture to f13.

Another challenge when shooting fast-moving subjects is focus.  This is where a high-end, professional camera really pays for itself.  Our Canon EOS 1d Mark III is known as a "sports shooter" and has a newly redesigned auto focus system with 45 auto-focus points, 19 of which are "cross-type" points which can focus on horizontal and vertical lines of contrast.  To get this shot, we set our auto-focus to AI Servo mode which can intelligently track moving objects to predict correct focus.  Proper focus, however, isn't magic and doesn't always require such sophisticated technology.  Road criterium racing is a great way to get started with sports shooting because the riders complete a lap roughly every 2 minutes so it gives you plenty of opportunity to setup a shot.  To get this shot without a sophisticated auto-focus system you could simply set your lens to manual focus and pre-focus your lens to the spot you want to shoot.  We always have a "zone" in which we want the shot to take place.  To establish our zone we study the background/foreground elements, lighting, and path the riders take in the road and determine what will make the best composition.  Once you have a zone picked out it's pretty simple to pre-focus on something in that zone.  This is another area where "chimping" is perfectly acceptable - while determining the right focus for your zone, just use trial and error until you get it right. That's one of the beauties of digital photography!

The last thing you'll need to capture action is a good technique.  All good sports shooters have a natural instinct for being able to anticipate the "right" moment that comes with years of experience and an in-depth knowledge of the sport.  There are some things you can do however to improve your chances.  Set your camera to Continuous shooting mode.  In this mode your camera will take a photo as fast as it can for as long as you hold the button down.  When shooting in Continuous mode, you can start shooting a slight second before the moment and continue shooting slightly after the moment to ensure you captured just the right shot.  Another technique that we used for the shot above is "panning".  If the camera was held completely still at 1/50th, the rider would pass right through the frame before the shutter closed, rendering him completely blurry and the background completely in focus - the exact opposite of what we wanted.  So to properly pan this shot, we begin pointing the camera at a location slightly down the street and as the rider rides by we move the camera to the right, following him at exactly the same speed he is moving.  This takes practice and patients but when you get it right, it's magical.

How To Balance Flash & Daylight

For those of you who participated in our poll, it's clear that you are interested in more "how-to" articles and one of the common questions we get asked is "How do I balance flash light and day light?"  To answer the question, let's deconstruct one of our images in which we balanced a sunset with off-camera fill flash.

In this image, we positioned our model high up on a grassy hill with the sunset behind her.  Definitely a challenging scenario for a camera set to Auto mode.  What you would get would be an image that was exposed for the sky and a model completely obscured by shadow.  If your camera has a built-in flash it would probably use it to fill the model but on-camera flash will produce very harsh shadows and potentially some red-eye.  The solution to lighting this scene is to balance an off-camera flash with the available daylight.

Learning how to deconstruct a photograph is a valuable tool for learning and there are two things that will make it easier.

1. Find the light source(s) by observing the shadows
2. Look into the reflections in the eyes to see the shooting setup

In this case, you can't see her eyes close enough but if you look carefully you'll see the tell-tale signs of a double shadow under her forearms and around her hands.  This tells us immediately that at least two light sources were used to light her.  And if you look REALLY closely you can see that one shadow is darker and harder than the other, which tells us that one strobe was set to a lower power than the other.

Ok enough guessing...here's how to balance flash & daylight for an image like this.  The first thing to do is determine the base exposure value for the scene.  In our case, we measure exposure by taking an ambient reading from our Sekonic L-758DR light meter. Set your camera to M mode and use this exposure setting to control the ambient light.  Now we can make our creative decisions.

We knew we wanted this scene to be bright and cheerful with a small difference between the fill light and sunlight.  The first creative decision you need to make when balancing light is "how much balance do I want to achieve?".  In this case we wanted a natural looking image that didn't look like we were using artificial light but we underexposed the ambient scene by 1 stop so that we could saturate the colors a bit more.

The next thing to do is determine your strobe exposure.  The placement, power output and diffusing of your lights will all help achieve a specific look.  We placed two AB800 strobes with standard parabolic reflectors on either sides of the model at about the same distance as the camera.  We then used our Sekonic L-758DR to trigger the strobes and take an exposure reading.  We lower the power output and take another reading until we achieve the same exposure value as the ambient light (eg: both ambient and strobes measure f8)  We then dropped the power settings of the left strobe so that the front of our model didn't appear flat.  If we had lit her completely evenly with two strobes there wouldn't be any depth to her clothes or body.  We used one more light directly behind the model to create a "rim" effect on her skin and hair. That light source is called the Sun!

Learning to balance strobe and ambient light is an extremely powerful technique that will elevate your photography to the next level.

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