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.