Quite recently, I had the opportunity to take some shots of young kids enjoying a game of futsal. Futsal is basically like 5-a-side indoor football. I took this opportunity to experiment a little more about shooting a sports event.
The basic settings that I began with was:-
- Maximum aperture for fastest shutter speed (most experienced sports photographer would use a tele-lens with at least a F2.8 aperture).
- Continuous AF (AF-C)
- Continuous shooting mode (press and let the camera go at the maximum frames per second (FPS))
- Spot metering (not sure why I did this, any comments on whether I should use spot, center-weighted or multi-segment metering?)
Most of my shots were at 90 or 100 mm @ F4. It was an outdoor event and hence I was able to get a shutter speed of about 1/320 or better. This was using my Sony A200 with the Minolta 70-210mm F3.5-4.5.
Other basic guidelines are:-
- Shoot away even as you never know when is the right moment. Also remember, we are in the era of Digital SLR, hence shoot away!
- Get on your knees or even your belly for better angle.
- Take some risk and move around the field. The risk is of course, getting hit by the ball!
I was quite please with some of the results, not because of the sharpness of the images (now, that’s quite difficult when you have fast moving subjects), but the sequence of images that brings a story to it. 
Now, did that all happen in 1 second? … =P
No comments:
Post a Comment