Spring Sports

Just some basic Photo 101 here, so if you already know this stuff then just ignore this post.

Backgrounds: high school fields can have some really distracting backgrounds, yellow school busses, some yahoo in a bright shirt hanging on the fence, lots of chainlink, etc. Shallow depth of field is key in creating a compelling image. You want to isolate the players, draw the viewers eye to the action and not the junk cluttering up the backgrounds.
Sometimes a different angle can make the difference between a snapshot and a photograph. Shooting up from a lower position or getting up into the stands and shooting down. Think about your settings and try and visualize the shot.

Sharpness: I've seen shots that would have been really great if they had just been sharp. Usually the culprit isn't focus but a slow shutter speed. As the light fades in the afternoon, keep an eye on your shutter speed and try to keep it up as high as possible, anything under 1/1000 is really pushing it, I like to stay over 1/2000. The ability to change ISO's on the fly is a great advantage with digital cameras, use it. The other culprit that causes an otherwise good photo to go bad is the teleconverter (aka extender), a 1.4tc will sometimes work well, but a 2x almost never does and never, ever, ever use a 2x on a zoom. Experiment all you want with them, but please check out the image quality of the photo and make sure it's up to par. Just because you want to stand further back from the action doesn't mean lowering image quality standards. Color and contrast usually suffer as well as sharpness, great way to make an expensive lens look like a piece of junk hunk of glass. They will also slow down your AF as well as losing a stop of light.

Color: Digital cameras just don't handle color temps as well as film. The color will really start to shift when the light starts to get cooler in the evenings. I understand golden light and a slightly warmer skin tone with afternoon light, but it shouldn't be an overal cast throughout the image. Sometimes it's just a toning issue, the image is dark and that will make the color shift, usually to red. Darker skinned players will look especially red if the image is too dark, by just brightening up the image in either curves or levels, the color will often correct itself. As far as white balance settings, I can only speak as a Canon shooter, AWB works the best for me. The other settings seem to actually cause color shifts.

Composition and Editing: Please don't shoot backs. Unless it's an incredible shot of a kid leaping or diving or doing something really cool, backs are a no no. No backs of batters, backs of kids squatting, backs of runners, etc. Seriously, get some face! And definitely no butt shots! That's particularly important during football season!
Don't shoot so tight that parts of the head or hands will get cropped off in printing. Try and leave a bit of space for that, but not too loose. Try not to shoot players or coaches just standing around looking stupid, get them yelling, gesturing, interacting with others. If you want to include some portraits, that's fine, but try and capture a moment when the person looks good or interesting.
If you're shooting baseball or softball, please don't post shots of players obviously missing the ball at bat.
Do a tight edit, just because it's sharp doesn't make it a great photo, 8fps make for some very similiar images, just pick the best ones.
Be creative, have fun!


Here's a good article on SportsShooter about clean backgrounds: http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/1915