First time shooting a football match. The result? 1.5 hours worth of blur photos! But it was fun! And I've gained new respect for sports photographer! It's really NOT an easy job at all! Besides trying to avoid getting hit by the ball, you also tend to follow the ball with your camera, thus missing lots of other candid shots. And most of the time, the action just happens too fast to capture it in time. Guess you just need to keep on shooting to get a nice action shot. Oh well. Here's the first batch of my maiden sports event outing :) Let me scan through the rest of the photos to see if they're worth uploading. My battery died 1.5 hours into the shot, and died again while I was editing the photos, so this is just the first half of the available photos I got. Stay tune! Btw, these are photos of my company's first football outing, that's how I end up in the field with my camera :) Hmmm, maybe I should try badminton next outing . . .
The first trick -- don't get too caught up peering through the viewfinder. You should set the relevant settings (ISO, white balance, shutter speed, aperture) first, then only need to do fine-tuning. It's not like an open-air day shoot where the ambient light levels can change based on which cloud floated across the sun, so you have some consistency there.
ReplyDeleteInstead, follow the general action with your camera ready, but away from your face. If you see candid shot material, you can quickly bring about to face. If you see hot action coming up, can bring up to follow the action.
The second trick -- follow the person, not the ball. Unless you going for artsy-fartsy ball action, most of the time you want to play on the interaction of players, so you need the focus on the players, not the ball. Also, the person is a bigger target, easier to track...
Hmm, maybe you're on to something here. Night shoots are largely wasting time trying for great colours; might as well shoot in greyscale.
Oh, btw.. DSLR has "free" motor/ continuous drives and continual focus for a reason. Action shots benefit from that -- I don't make use of it very often personally, but they are hugely useful in certain circumstances (and a pain in the ass in others).
ReplyDeleteYo once again, thanks for the great comments. Let me stress that I didn't shoot those photo in greyscale. I had to edit it to greyscale cause the colour version of the photo was of shit quality due to blurness :(
ReplyDeleteAs for shooting action shots, after 30 minutes, I kinda realise it was pretty poitless following the fall with the view finder. And after 60 minutes, I was just happy to click away without caring much what was being captured :P Somehow the quality of photo improved after I stop caring so much and decided to just shoot first, worry later :D
But like I say, it was fun cause there was just so many things happending at once that is screaming out for your attention! Hey, go organize a sports event camera outing!