Sports Photography
Through the kindness of my workplace and my friends, I was able to acquire tickets to an Edmonton Eskimos Football game and an Edmonton Cracker Cats Baseball game. I had good seats as well.
Doing sports photography is pretty fun. Timing is a huge component. I pretty much had to watch 70% of the game through my viewfinder. The cool thing about sports is that there is a lot of repetition, so if I missed a moment, I can wait a bit and there’s a chance that it might happen again.
I am glad I had a good telephoto VR lens as well. I was moving quite a bit and I took a lot of my shots at 200mm. Focus control was a huge factor too. My 18-200mm lens focuses quickly. However, because of the speed of the action, and the subjects changing distances pretty fast, the autofocus kept switching. As a result, some of my initial photos were a little out of focus. I didn’t want to lock the focus either because I needed to change the focus plane and quick and then lock. The solution was the manual focus. Sports photography (especially in Football) really gave me a chance to play with manual focus and test my skills. I came out of the events feeling more confident on the use of manual focus.
What I also found is that a small depth of field is very effective in sports photography. With all the chaos in sports, using a small depth of field (wide aperture) helps to isolate the subject by blurring out everything in the background and sharpening only the ones in the focus plane. In baseball it can isolate the batter from the pitcher. Or in football, the wide receiver can be isolated from the defenders as they run to the end zone.
Many beautiful shots can be made in sports photography with the mixture and careful control of focal length, aperture, and manual focus. I learned A LOT in those few hours of sports photography and I look forward to doing more of it and learning more in the future.