Mastering the Art of Sports Photography With your Digital Camera

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For sports enthusiasts, there’s nothing more exciting than sports people playing their favorite game. The sight of the field, rink or golf course initiates the thrill and anticipation. This, combined with digital photography, can provide some amazing photographic opportunities.

However it’s not a matter of point the camera at the person diving for the ball or puck and snapping away. It’s a lot more complicated than that.

In digital photography sports can be quite challenging. The sports people do not present an easy task of being photographed because of the amount of high movement. However, you can indeed achieve great sports digital photography. Most excellent sports digital photography requires good planning and execution.

Here are some exclusive tips for gaining fantastic sports shots in your digital photography.

First things first; know your digital camera. I recommend taking note and practicing first all the settings that sports photography needs. You may find yourself going for the faster shutter speed, increased ISO and burst mode. Let’s take a look at all these things on your digital camera and see how they can be applied to give you sensational sports photos.

High shutter speeds:

As with all moving objects, in order to capture the “frozen in time” look in digital photography a fast shutter speed is required. The faster the movement the faster the shutter speed will need to be. In digital photography the general consensus is that the shutter speed needs to be faster than that of the subject.

For example if you have a sliding puck across ice and there is someone about to take a dive for it then its necessary to quickly mentally assess how fast that person might be traveling at. If they are traveling at approximately 50 kilometers (approx 32 miles) per hour then you may find a very fast shutter speed is needed for this digital photo.

A very fast shutter speed in digital photography may be anything from 500th of a second or higher. For high speed movement you may want to consider an even faster shutter speed of 1000th of a second or something in that range.

Keep in mind that in digital photography a fast shutter speed works to reduce some of the light which is why a higher ISO is often necessary. (I’ll talk about that in a minute.) Usually a if a ball, such as a baseball going at around 145 kilometers an hour (90.09 miles per hour) then a shutter speed of around 1/4000 will get you that “suspended ball in mid air” type of photo.

For physical movement, such as someone leaping to catch a football, a shutter speed of 1/500 or over is a good place to start.

Now this is all very well if your scene is well lit. But what if you are taking your digital photography shots indoors at night and the light is not quite enough to provide enough light? In most instances, an indoor stadium at night time will be well lit, but that doesn’t always ensure good digital photos.

In sports photography we need to understand that we can only control the artistic value and input of our digital photo and the control of the camera. We can’t control the lighting on the scene being such a public event.

In digital photography sports photos we must realize that it’s going to be a challenge to begin with. So here are thing’s you can do in your digital sports photography to increase the amount of light.

If you have a light tool on your digital camera such as a histogram you can get a good idea of what the light levels are like on your sensor. With this handy tool you can adjust the ISO at the time of your pictures taking.

Increase your ISO: A high ISO in digital photography simply means the sensitivity to light that your digital camera has. In a nutshell the more ISO you have increased the image to, the less light the sensor needs.

In sports photography an ISO of 400 or higher can work really well. The downside to this is that it does increase noise. To combat this you can use noise reduction software in the post editing process such as Noise Ninja or increase the LAB mode in the post editing process. Don’t be afraid to try a few shots at 400, 800 and even as high as 1600.

Burst mode:

In most sports digital photography this will be one of the settings you will turn to. Burst mode is also known as ‘continuous shooting’. This ‘continuous’ shooting mode allows you to get a sequence of shots in succession. You can increase your chances of getting that ideal “split second perfect shot” that you might not be able to get by pre-emption or in normal shooting.

This also works beautifully if your digital camera has a painfully long lag time. I’ve used this so many times to get around the high lag my Sony Cyber shot has got. Some cameras have 3 frames per second and some go up to 12 frames per second. You simply select this mode and hold your finger on the shutter button and it will fire off as many shots in 1 second as it can.

Okay so I’ve been talking about your digital camera and the setting’s used for ideal sports digital photography, so what about any external equipment? If you have been thinking about this you’re spot on.

You can take as much time with your settings but there’s not much point if you can’t get close to the action. There’s no point having a picture with perfect lighting and perfect action if the players are like dots on a sheet of paper. You need a good telephoto lens if you can’t get close up. A telephoto lens brings you closer because of its long distance capability. It will get you closer to the action but will need a faster shutter speed.

Many fantastic sports digital photos are taken with an emphasis on a very fast shutter speed, an f stop of around the 2.8 mark to blur the background and focus in on the subject. You may find that if your sportsperson is visually separated from the background and you take the digital photograph with a telephoto lens you’ll have a more shallow depth of field which can give you a more powerful feeling in your digital photo. You can get away with a good optical zoom lens, but you’ll get far better digital sports shots with a proper telephoto.

So what about the artistic side of sports photography with your digital camera? Plenty!

Pre-emption and Emotion is the key to good art.

When taking sports photography you probably won’t find a more public display of human emotion. The emotions of a sports person range from intense anticipation to extreme disappointment or extreme exhilaration. Pre-empting when these emotions take place is the key to getting artistic and impressive sports photos. This comes with practicing your digital photography.

SO much pressure is placed on our athletes, expecting them to perform so we can enjoy the show and the investors can enjoy their returns. This is another reason why I say to get a telephoto lens so you can capture the emotions on their faces and their body language. It makes for superb photography. For ideas on ice hockey, have a look at some ice hockey images that are great study tools.

Don’t just look at these digital photos, you must study them. Take on the attitude that studying sports photography will improve your digital sports photos ten fold. You will have a style to emulate and copy to start with then eventually, when you become confident, you’ll start to adopt your own style.

Happy shooting,

Amy Renfrey

To study digital sports photography check these sites out: http://www.espn.com/ and http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/ and http://cbs.sportsline.com/

Amy Renfrey is the author of two major successful ebooks “Digital Photography Success” and “Advanced Digital Photography”. She is a photographer and also teaches digital photography. She’s photographed many things from famous musicians to portraits of babies. Amy also teaches photography online to her students which can be found at www.DigitalPhotographySuccess.com
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Discovering new avenues in Photography

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Mauritius is one of the most favorite destinations for a wedding and that is why a Wedding photography in Mauritius is so popular and in demand. Obviously, the photography  can capture the magic of your wedding in a most special way.

Wedding photography Mauritius can create magical albums by capturing each moment of the most important day of your life. When we see portfolios then we dream of getting the same quality of snaps.

We all see our wedding pictures every now and then and nothing feels better than seeing ourselves in beautiful poses. It feels great to see ourselves beautiful and in great poses.

The wedding photographer that you select  has the greatest role in making you look beautiful and natural in your wedding pictures. Wedding Photographers are trained to capture each small moment in an innovative manner so that everything looks natural. It becomes very important to find and book a Wedding Photographer well before hand so that you can get the best Wedding Photographer for your wedding.

Apart from weddings, people are crazy about portrait photography and they want the best. Family portraits are also getting popular and have become common for living rooms. Portrait Photography can easily help you in getting a perfect family portrait for your living room.

You can also get couple portraits for your bedroom and can also be used in the special corners of your home. Before you decide to go to a professional who can do Portrait Photography for you, you need to be sure of the kind of portrait you want and what your budget is for a Portrait Photography.

Portrait Photography for living rooms is certainly different than the Portrait Photography that is done for other types of portraits.

Note that photography courses can help you in establishing a career as a photographer if taken seriously. You can do a specialization course in any of the fields of photography. Fashion photography is one of the most popular specializations that have huge prospects for a bright career. You can get help and information from renowned named like Clique photographers that have become a brand in photography.

Denise writes about fashion photography and wedding photography Australia. Make creative career in commercial photography in Melbourne or portrait photography.
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To Shoot Or Not To Shoot?

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Too many people think that just because they can take a photograph of something, they should take a photograph. As a result, we often see online photo streams that are clogged with several photos of the same thing, or photographs that don’t really show anything. The more that you consider the photographs you take, the better you will become as a photographer.

Taking photographs has become very easy due to the innovations in camera technology, and as a result there are a lot of occasions where people take a photograph just because they can. By doing this, they never really learn how to capture a moment in the right way. Of course, it is no big deal if people are just taking photographs for their own enjoyment. But when you receive an email which has 25 photographs of the same thing, it gets annoying.

The advantage of shooting only when you have to is that you consider the photograph a lot more closely. If you want to get the best depiction of your chosen scene, you need to take into account the way that subjects are positioned, the way that you are positioned, and the light as well as a number of other factors.

If you want to seriously take up photography, you may have noted the fact that professionals will often have fifty or more shots to get the one that “really works”. However, they are working to an exceptionally high standard and often with motion and human models. They still need to be on the mark for all fifty shots, as the right picture does not happen just through luck.

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A Bad Workman Always Blames His Tools

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Camera equipment can be extremely expensive, particularly if you begin to take photography seriously as a career option. Therefore it is important to make sure that you get the right equipment for the job. However, be careful of placing too much importance on the quality of the equipment, as you can end up spending hundreds on equipment that is not going to make much difference.

One of the harshest, but truest sayings there is, goes as follows: A bad workman always blames his tools. Now, it may well not be the case that you are a bad photographer – in any case, there is a world between good and bad – but the important thing to remember is that blaming the equipment you use, and replacing it, can sometimes hold back your improvement.

When you take a photograph and it comes out looking bad, it is important to bear in mind that there could be countless reasons for this. It could be the light, it could be the positioning of the shot, it could be any number of things. It could, indeed, be the camera, and if this is the case then replacing the apparatus may be the only way to go. Regardless, you have to know the difference between a bad photo and a bad camera.

Some of the best photographers around started with cheap cameras that had defects, and became such good photographers by learning to work with what they had. Rather than spending money trying to find the best camera, it is advisable to spend time trying to become the best photographer you can be.

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A Sense Of Occasion

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Even in the light of all the changes that have taken place over the years, allowing us to take more photographs in a shorter space of time and to publish them within seconds, the fact is that sometimes less is more. You will not become a good photographer by taking a lot of photographs. You will never win the Tour de France on a bicycle with training wheels.

What this means for amateur photographers is that, just because it is easier to take a photograph these days, it does not mean that you can replace quality with quantity. It is better to critically survey your photographs, delete the ones that don’t pass muster, and keep in mind what you got wrong initially and how you can get it right next time.

You see, if you just snap away in the hope of getting the right shot, you are as likely to get twenty shots of which maybe five will be good enough to be considered “decent”. If, on the other hand, you take the time to get it right, you can get five photos of which all are impressive. Making the effort to get the shot right gives the shot a sense of occasion.

Photography is not easy, and anyone who attempts to claim otherwise is being either naive or ignorant. Getting the right shot makes demands of a photographer, and the sooner you learn to meet those demands, the easier you will find it as time goes on.

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Should I Get A Photographic Qualification?

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There are many people who want to become professional photographers, and there is plenty of reason why they would. If you are a highly sought-after photographer, then you can get paid a lot of money to travel the world taking photographs of stunning locations, beautiful people and remarkable occasions. So is it worth getting a qualification in photography?

The answer to this question, frustratingly, is “it might be”. When you get down to it, there are not so many companies or agencies who will demand that you have a certificate to prove you can take photographs. The best way to document a talent for photography is by showing the photographs that you have taken. That said, doing a photography course may help in other ways.

It cannot be denied that, if you take a course in photography that is taught by a professional who has worked worldwide, you should learn a lot from them and may also be able to make contacts in the business. There is a major difference between being able to take impressive photographs, and being able to get the perfect shot when you are on the clock and conditions are being unkind.

It is not so much the certificate that will be given to you on graduation that will be important, but the things that you learn during the course. There are all sorts of tricks that can make a photograph look better, and make a good photograph great. Informing yourself about these is worth the effort.

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Seeing It Through The Right Filter

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There will always be divided opinion on the merits of “artistic” photography. For some people, a photograph which depicts an everyday face or item in a different way is worth looking at because it is interesting. For others, it will be considered the height of pretentious idiocy. The view that you take on this conundrum will probably depend on how interested you are in photography.

There is a difference, one which needs to be noted, between taking such a photograph for artistic reasons, and doing it because you have seen it done elsewhere. The photograph may make the item look like something else, or it may show people a side of the subject that had not been seen before. If it is done because “it looks a bit arty” then it will usually be fairly obvious.

Many of the photographs taken to depict a subject in an unfamiliar way do so by making use of filters. Filters can be purchased and fitted to the lens of a more old-fashioned camera to provide soft-focus looks, a sepia tone or some other form of tinting. They may, alternatively, be added at a later stage to digital photographs using Photoshop. Some cameras, indeed, have specific filtered settings.

If you want to take a photograph that has an interesting look, give some thought to photographs you have seen. Are you bringing something new to the table, or experimenting with what you yourself are capable of doing? Or are you, alternatively, taking a photograph of a table through a sepia filter because you think it is what you are supposed to do?

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The Digital Age And How It Has Changed Things

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The process of photography is one that has changed immensely in all of our lifetimes – even those of us who are not yet old enough to read this. But for those of us who have a few decades on the clock, the changes are most noticeable. We all remember a time when taking a photograph meant a wait of at least a day or two before seeing the finished result. These days, it is a matter of seconds.

Digital photography is the cause for much of the change that has taken place. It used to be the case that we would take a photograph and think “I hope I haven’t messed that up”, in the full knowledge that you would have to wait until a couple of days after you got back from holiday to see whether or not you had. As almost all digital cameras now come fitted with a preview screen, that’s not an issue anymore.

There is some debate over whether this has led to any real improvement in the quality of photographs most people take. You can have five, ten or even twenty goes at truly capturing the majesty of the Eiffel Tower, but if you are unfamiliar with how to position yourself it will not matter whether or not there are people walking through the shot.

Camera phones have taken things onto a new level. It is now possible to take a photo on your cell phone and post it to a site such as Flickr or to your Twitter account within seconds. This has its good points – you can make your friends jealous and keep them posted – and its bad points too. It only takes one ill-advised drunken photograph to disgust a lot of friends.

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When Everything Was Black And White

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Color photography was actually invented a lot longer ago than most people believe – indeed, there were experimental color shots taken as long ago as the 19th century. However, the use of color photography was hugely uncommon until the 1960s, and it was another few decades after that before newspapers printed color shots with any kind of regularity.

This – combined with the presence of old-fashioned black and white movies – gives an impression of age and for some people an impression of depth to photographs taken these days using black and white film or filters. Many of the iconic photographs of all time, taken as they were in the early half of the 20th century, are known to us in black and white.

One of the most famous images – the assassination of President John F Kennedy, an incident that took place in 1963 – happened after color photography was introduced, but before it was widespread and before color photographs could be widely reproduced. Hence, it is an incident we “remember” in black and white.

Photographs of the first Moon Landing do exist in color, but the most iconic – of Neil Armstrong descending the ladder onto the Moon’s surface – is also in black and white. Whether it is for reasons of historic grandeur, or because of the questions left unasked, many people even in this age of color photography still like to use black and white for more artistic shots.

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Photoshop – Cheating Or Necessity?

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Unless you have been hiding in a cave somewhere, you are probably familiar with Photoshop to at least some extent. Even if you have not used it, you will have seen photos that have been manipulated using this program, which has become a feature of many websites in recent years. The basic idea of Photoshop is that it can be used to enhance or add to a real photo.

For example, if a picture has been taken which, on closer inspection, carries traces of something that the viewer “should not see” – for example, blotches on the face of someone in the photo, or a stain on the carpet – the use of Photoshop can remove that undesired intruder. Similarly, Photoshop can be used to add things such as color or light.

A more esoteric use of Photoshop can be seen on countless sites around the Internet where photographs are deliberately and obviously manipulated for (usually) comedic effect. Whether it is putting someone else’s head on the body of an animal (or another person), placing a person against a background with comic potential or creating the impression that someone is a hundred feet tall, this is a popular pastime.

You may love or hate Photoshop. Some people will use it to enhance their own photographs before putting them on social networking sites, and create the impression that they are more attractive than they really are. This may not have been the initial purpose of the program, but people will use it how they wish.

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