Sports Photography

Sports photography, especially indoors, requires equipment beyond a good camera. Photographs should appear to be as close as possible to the action, and the action itself should be frozen.

You'll need a long telephoto lens, one with the largest aperture you can afford. This will get you close enough to show facial expressions during the most intense interactions. It also means you can get shots when the action is on the other side of the gym.

An external flash is also necessary (and not just for sports photos), as the built-in flash on your camera is only good for about 5 metres.

Avoid shooting in full auto mode; your camera will try to maximize the brightness of your photo, and may change the iso value to do this, resulting in grainy pictures. Learn more about this here.

My external flash didn't cycle fast enough to allow me to do burst shooting indoors, where a single push of the shutter button would result in ten or more shots taken in rapid succession, with at least one of the shots catching just the right moment in the action. That worked great outdoors on Track & Field Day, but not indoors.

Also, the autofocus setting wasn't always quick enough to take rapid-fire shots reliably.
Instead, I would prefocus on a region on the floor where I knew action would eventually happen, and wait for the action to come to that spot!

It's also very important to take advantage of the most important feature of digital cameras: the ability to take many photos without it costing anything! During a typical basketball game I would take between 100-200 photos, hoping for at least 50 useable ones, and perhaps 10 spectacular shots.

['Without it costing anything' of course doesn't count editing time. One basketball game required several hours of editing, not to mention the time it took to create and upload the relevant HTML pages to the yearbook. But I loved doing it!]

Over the course of my 44 year teaching career I took many hundreds of thousands of photographs. That's the final key to taking good photos ... lots of practice! Take lots of pictures and remember what worked and what didn't. Experiment! Take photos in all sorts of lighting conditions. Be creative!

On these pages I've displayed a number of my favourite photos taken at sporting events that turned out amazingly well. These all can be found in the Worsley School On-line Yearbooks, which are now on my site after a decade's absence. You are free to download and save anything you want.