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Sports photography isn’t for everyone and you need to have an interest in sports if you want to look at being a photographer for sports or action shots. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t learn the ins and outs of sports photography and apply it to your normal daily photography techniques. Sports photography most of the time is best applied with fast shutter speeds and a tripod to accompany it if possible. The tripod is merely to give your arms a rest while whole chunks of time pass by without anything happening. The tripod also helps if you want to use a technique called panning. In this technique you keep the camera firmly rooted on the vertical axis and pan, or move the camera from one end to the other on the horizontal axis. And if that sounded confusing, let me try to come at it from a different direction. Take a race course for example. You’re standing dab smack in the middle of the straight leg of the course and you want to take a shot where the background is blurred but the car is crystal sharp. This is a common enough shot in sports photography and one that is used often to create a motion blur where the viewer gets the impression of great motion from the photograph. So in this case, let’s say that the car would be coming at you from the left heading towards your right. You would set up your camera on your tripod and aim the lens towards the left where you know the car will enter your field of view from. You get the car in your sights and keep it there, all the while moving your camera on the tripod from left to right along with the car. Since you’re at some distance from the car the speed of it won’t unduly affect the speed of your camera movement either, so you have enough time to move the camera in one smooth movement from left to right. This is called panning the camera in sports photography. This is how you get those great shots of greyhounds depicted sharply against a blurred background, or grand prix cars zooming on the track. In sports photography, only the car, or object, that you keep as your focal subject though will have this clarity, everything else will blur differently according to its speed relative to your main subject. Muna wa Wanjiru is a Web Administrator and has been Researching and Reporting on Digital Photography for years. For more information on sports photography, visit his site at Sports Photography
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