Like many people, when I first started getting into photography (or more correctly, when I started getting back into photography), I was focused on the camera.

Over time, I learned that it’s less about the camera and more about the lenses, or “glass”, to use the term photographers use. It’s not uncommon for a photographer to get attached to their lenses and keep them for years.

After you’ve shot for a while, you may find that the results that you’re getting aren’t quite up to what you were hoping for – you’d like to get pictures that are more like the ones the pros get.

At that point, it might be a good idea to think about new glass.

70-200mm

The 70-200mm zoom is a great lens for shooting field sports – it has enough reach to bring players close but it goes wide enough to handle players that are close. It’s relatively light and relatively cheap.

This is such a popular lens that Canon makes four different lenses:

• 70-200mm F4L ($660)
• 70-200mm F4L IS ($1234)
• 70-200mm F2.8L ($1330)
• 70-200mm F2.8L IS ($1950)

Why did I choose those lenses? Wouldn’t Canon’s 100-300mm F4.5-5.6 be a much cheaper choice at $295?

It would be a cheaper choice, but it wouldn’t be a satisfying choice.

The four lenses are part of Canon’s “L” line of lenses – the ones that are designed for pros. They have superior optical performance, especially at the wide apertures where you will spend most of your time. They also are faster (gather more light) than the non-L lenses, and have faster focusing systems. At least some of them are parfocal, which means that you don’t have to refocus if you change the zoom.

You do pay a weight penalty. The 100-300 weighs 1.2 lbs, and the 4 lenses I list weigh 1.6, 1.7, 2.8, and 3.2 pounds. I have the third one on my list – put that on my 40D and together they weigh 4.4 pounds. I’m okay using that for a game, but I shot at a charity 5K run recently and my arms were killing me by the end.

The “IS” on some of the lenses says that the lens has Canon’s excellent image stabilization built in. Stabilization reduces the shaking of the camera when you handhold a lens. I have a 24-105mm F4L IS lens, and the stabilization on that is scary good.

But it doesn’t help in a lot in field sports. I’m looking to freeze the player’s movement, and having a nice stable background with blurry players isn’t much help.

My recommendation is that you start at the cheap (well, less expensive) end of the range, and try the 70-200mm F4L.

Other brands

There are other lens makers – Tamron and Sigma come to mind – that make lenses that also cover this range. I’ve heard that some of them are pretty good, but I prefer to stick with the Canon L lenses, because I know what their quality is and they hold their value well. If you want to buy a non-Canon lens, I suggest you compare their review scores to those of the comparable Canon lenses.

Nikon also makes excellent lenses in this range, but frankly, the whole Nikon lens line confuses me, so you’re on your own there. If anybody can give good Nikon recommendations, please feel free to add them in the comments and I’ll include them here…

Used lenses

Unlike camera bodies – which depreciate at an alarming rate – lenses hold their value well. You can find well-cared-for examples of any of the lenses I’ve listed, and you might save 30% or so on a used lens. And, if it turns out that you don’t like the lens, you can resell it, often at pretty much what you paid for it.

There are pros that do this regularly – they’ll buy a used expensive lens, use it for a specific assignment, and then resell it.

It pays to do some research before you buy a used lens – in some cases there are multiple versions of a single lens (with different quality), and sometimes a lens will have production issues that are only fixed in later versions.

Two of my L lenses came from the buy/sell forums on FredMiranda.com. There are also some online stores that offer used lenses.

Longer lenses

Canon’s 100-400mm f4.5-5.6L IS Lens ($1680, 3 lb) is sometimes used for sports, but it’s a bit slower than comparable lenses.

Most of the lenses beyond 200mm are prime (non-zoom) lenses.

There’s the very popular 300mm F4 L IS ($1300, 2.6 lbs) and 300mm F2.8 L IS – ($4600, 6! lbs). Most people use a monopod for the F2.8 variant, because of the weight.

If you need longer, the 400mm F2.8 L IS ($7500, 11.7 lbs) and finally the 600mm F4.0 L IS ($8300, 11.8 lbs) are also available. Maybe little Johnny will get that basketball scholarship…

The 600mm is a bit large as well. That tiny silver thing at the back is the camera body…

Teleconverters

A teleconverter attaches between the lens and the body and offers an extra multiple of magnification. Add a 1.4x teleconverter to your 70-200mm, and it magically becomes a 100-280mm lens. In the process, you lose some image quality, and that F4 lens becomes an F5.6 lens – you lose shutter speed and background blurriness.

Whether it’s acceptable depends on whether you can afford the loss of image quality and light. Canon L lenses are good enough that the loss of image quality is often acceptable, so if you have the light it’s interesting to try, especially if you have an F2.8 lens.

There are also 2x teleconverters – in these you turn the F4 lens into an F8 lens, which won’t even autofocus on many camera bodies, and you lose a lot of image quality. I don’t think it has much use in sports.

Rental

Before you drop $1K+ on a lens, you might want to try it out for a week. You can rent a 70-200F2.8 L for about $60 for a week, a small price to find out if the lens is worth it for you.

Manufacturing quality

It would be nice if all lenses were perfect from the factory, but unfortunately that isn’t always true. In some lenses the normal manufacturing tolerances line up to produce great results,and in some they go the other way and result in average results. In some cases, the manufacturer can service an average lens and turn it into sharp lens. If you think your lens isn’t performing the way it should, you might want to do this, preferably while the lens is under warranty (one disadvantage of buying used).

The following assumes that you have a basic understanding of aperture and how it affects shutter speed and depth-of-field. If you’d like a quick refresher, the following links should help:

• Shutter and Aperture
• Understanding depth-of-field

Or use a search engine – there are lots of good explanations out there.

My recommendation is that you set your camera to F4, and then adjust your ISO to give you an acceptable shutter speed (I prefer 1/1000th or faster, though I’ll accept a bit lower if necessary).

If you know a bit about how the pros shoot, that may be a surprising recommendation. Most pros use big and expensive F2.8 lenses. So, why F4? Well, I think it’s the best compromise aperture, and will give you the highest percentage of good shots, especially if you’re starting out. In most cases…

To understand that “usually”, it’s useful (or at least I think it’s useful – you are welcome to post a comment telling me that I’m deluded) to discuss what a smaller aperture would do.

2.8 Gives us…

Blurrier background

A smaller aperture will definitely give you a nicer background. But it’s not going to turn those parents on the sidelines into a slightly mottled background, it’s going to turn them into slightly blurrier parents, with an emphasis on “slightly”. Blurrier is better, but I’m not sure you’re going to notice a the difference.

Less depth of field

The same thing that gave us a blurrier background gives us less depth-of-field on our subject. To take an example, my 40D @ 200mm and F4 gives a depth of field of about 5′, front and back. Step up to F2.8, and that reduces to about 4′. That doesn’t sound like a big difference, but it’s 1′ less margin for error in your autofocus system, and 1′ less range where two players can be. And I suspect that the calculated depths-of-field are a bit too big, since sharpness is so important in sports shots. I know I have shots at F4 where I wish for a bit more depth-of-field, and F2.8 makes it worse.

Worse lens performance

My 70-200mm F2.8 L lens is pretty darn sharp at F2.8. But it’s sharper at F4, and that’s for a lens that is explicitly designed to be very sharp wide open. Most lenses are better one stop down from the widest aperture.

So…

So, I’m suggesting F4, yet I spent the money and deal with the weight of the F2.8 over the F4 variant of the same lens. Why?

It’s simple. Light. My daughter’s lacrosse team plays in the evening, and they also play on some pretty gloomy weekends, and that means I don’t consistently have the light that I want. If I don’t, my options are to bump up the ISO (more noise), reduce the shutter speed (blurry players), or shift to F2.8. That’s when the F2.8 really earns its keep.

If you shoot indoors or under stadium lights, you have my condolences. I’ll talk about indoor/night shooting in the future.

What if my lens only goes to F4?

If you only have a lens that goes to F4, I recommend trying both F4 and F5.6 and seeing what you think. If you have (for example) a Canon 70-200mm F4L, I think you’ll be happy with the F4 performance. But if your lens isn’t good enough, you may be looking at a lens upgrade, I’ll talk about that in a future post…

Sports shots are pretty intolerant of incorrect focus.

The focus software built into your camera does its best to give you crisp focus in all conditions, but since all it knows is what you’re pointing it at, it has to make some guesses and some compromises. There are a couple of things that you can do to give it more information so that it can make better decisions and improve the number of in-focus shots. You’ll notice the common thread in this post – rather than let the camera make choices for you, you are making the choices yourself.

Focus mode

There are two basic types of subjects – those that are static, and those that are moving. In the default mode (AI Focus on Canon, AF-A on Nikon), the camera looks at the subject and tries to figure out which autofocus approach works better.

My experience on the cameras I’ve used (Canon XT & 40D) is that the camera often makes the wrong choice. You can get better results by choosing the focus mode optimized for moving subjects (AI Servo or AF-C).

Focus points

Your camera has an array of focus points – individual spots in the scene where the camera can detect focus. The number and sophistication of those focus points depends on the model of the camera – my 40D has 9 focus points, and the new 7D that I’m pining for has 19 focus points.

Like the focus mode, the camera looks at all the focus points and tries to determine which ones are most important and then focuses on those. Sometimes it works well, sometimes you find that in that beautifully-composed and exposed image, the camera decided it was better to make sure the fan in the background be in focus than the players.

Like focus mode, you can help the camera out by telling it what you think is important. By setting on focus point, you know if you put that focus point on the part of the image that you want to be in focus, the camera will try to put it in focus. Say you’re shooting runners and you want their faces in focus, you choose a focus point at the top of the frame.

However, all focus points are not created equal. On my 40D, the center focus point is better – it will work for lenses with higher minimum apertures than the other ones, and it may give better results as well.

When I’m shooting most sports, I stick with the center focus point because I know it will work well and I’d rather give up a little framing and have to crop an image down rather than try to shift the focus point from shot to shot.

Focus-on-demand

The camera chooses when it wants to focus, which can be inconvenient. You want to focus on the face of a player in a static situation and take the picture when the motion starts, but when you take the picture, the camera refocuses to what the focus point is on.

If your camera supports focus-on-demand, you can turn off the focus when you half-press the shutter and map the “focus now” function to a button on the back of the camera, which you press with your thumb. You now get full control on the focus, and on my 40D, the chosen focus point lights up red when the camera detects focus.

Enabling this is not without a downside. First, instead of just following the action, keeping the focus point where you want it, and pressing the shutter-release when it makes sense to take a picture, you also need to press the focus button (and sometimes hold it) at the appropriate point. For me, it took 4 games before I was approaching parity with the performance I was getting with the camera controlling focus, and a few more before I saw any benefits. And you run the risk of forgetting to press the focus button in other situations, like when you are taking a wonderfully wind-blown team photograph in perfect light. Not that I’ve ever done that.

I have this set all the time on aperture-priority on my camera. It’s possible to set it up on one of the custom modes on my camera – so it only does that when you turn the mode dial to C1 – but the power-off/on behavior in that mode resets the ISO so it doesn’t work for me.

It was a fair bit of pain to learn to do this but it’s made a noticeable difference in the quality of my images.

Release priority

One more small point about focus.

Canon cameras in AI servo mode operate in what is known as “release focus” for the first frame in a sequence. That means that the camera doesn’t delay taking the picture even if the camera hasn’t achieved focus. Later frames are “focus priority”, which means the camera knows when it’s going to take the picture and tries to have focus at that point.

So, even if you aren’t going to change the focus point or use focus-on-demand, it helps a lot of you stake sequences of shots rather than single shots – the later shots are more likely to be good.

Micro adjustment

Guess I wasn’t quite done.

The auto-focus system works through the collaboration of the camera and the lens. The camera detects the focus and drives the lens to perfect focus.

Well, it’s not quite that simple. Cameras and lenses are both physical devices and manufacturing tolerances mean that some of them focus really well, while other will back focus (the true focus point is actually behind the subject) or front focus (the true focus point is behind the subject). It’s the luck of the draw.

If you do focus tests – which I might talk about at some point, until then you can search the interwebs – you can tell how your camera/lens perform, and then send the lens and/or the camera (they work together) off to your manufacturer for calibration.

Or… you can buy a camera body that supports micro adjustment. You test the focus, and then you can dial in a little adjustment to get things just the way you want it. Another reason I’m pining for the 7D.

Or, “Where to stand…”

One of my goals in shooting sports is to get images that you can’t get as a spectator. Not only do I want to freeze the motion of the players, I’d like to get perspectives that are different from what you usually see. And I’d like to create images with as few distractions as possible.

Location has a lot to do with that. The following assumes that you are shooting a sport that takes place on a field or court, but the basic principles should apply to most sports.

Where does the action take place?

First off, you’ll want to figure out where the action that you care about takes place. If you are shooting soccer, the majority of the action takes place in the midfield, though shots and scoring take place at the ends.

In girl’s lacrosse, on the other hand, the majority of the action occurs near the goals, though this varies depending upon the specific rules that are in effect for the game (the rules are different for different ages).

So, it pays to be an informed spectator.

What do I want to cover?

I’m typically shooting to try to capture the whole game, and ideally that will feature all the players on the team. I’ll shoot from different spots so I can get both defensive and offensive players, and do this in both halves so I can get the outside players when they’re close to me.

If you are shooting for a single player, you will probably make different choices.

Where am I allowed to stand?

Different sports at different levels will put different constraints on where you can be. My goal is to remain within the league rules, and to conform to the desires of the coaches and the officials. The more official the sport, the more serious people are going to be about photography.

If you’re just getting started, it’s a nice courtesy to talk to the officials before the game, tell them what you’re planning on doing, and let them know that they should let you know if you are doing anything they’d prefer you not to do. Same with the coaches.

If you are allowed on any part of the endlines, try to stand at least 10 yards off the end of the field. This makes you much less obvious and intrusive.

Finally, you will likely run into parents who will avoid this, and go into places where they shouldn’t be. My advice is to ignore them.

Sun and Background

If the sun is mostly overhead, the sun direction is less important, but if it’s low, you will get much better results if you shoot with the sun behind you. If you are lucky enough to be able to shoot late afternoon games that are sunny, you have an opportunity to get sun that will get inside helmets or other headgear and a nice golden color, and my advice is to do what you can to take advantage of it.

In other situations, the background is going to have more of an impact on the quality of your shots. Take some time looking around the field when you arrive and decide what direction you prefer to get the best backgrounds. The ends of fields are often pretty clear, so shooting from the ends can be a benefit.

Height

In many cases, you’ll want to use the standard “standing up” position, and I do this a lot when I’m moving around between positions. But look for different perspectives – last year I took some nice shots from a high balcony about 50′ above a field, and I regularly take shots lying down at the end of the field (but only on dry turf fields…).

Special situations

Shooting goalkeepers is hard. They are facing away from the endlines, and they’re a long way away from the sidelines, and even if you have enough reach to capture them, they’re often facing the other side. And they may not be very busy during some games.

The solution is to go out on the field and shoot them during warmup. That gets you 20 yards from them instead of 50, and you can easily get 50-60 nice shots in a few minutes.

Cheering

You’re either a photographer, or you’re a spectator. If you’re out close to the field, you should act like you’re part of the field – no cheering, no talking to the players, etc. It’s a privilege to be out there, so don’t abuse it.

In many areas of photography, you can get nice results with high-end point-and-shoot cameras (such as the Canon G series), and sometimes with a cheaper point-and-shoot.

Sports photography is not one of those. For sports shots, you want:

1. Short exposure times, so that you can freeze the player’s motion.
2. Good autofocus, so you can focus on the player.
3. Telephoto lenses, so you can get close enough to the action.
4. A decent-sized sensor, so the level of noise is acceptable.

Put those all together, and the answer you get is “SLR”. I’m a Canon guy, so I’ll talk in those terms, but there are equivalent choices in Nikon’s line since the two biggies are always fighting for the top of the heap.

At the entry-level, you need:

• A DSLR of relatively recent vintage.
• A lens that goes to 200mm (preferably a zoom, ‘cause it’s easier to use).

That puts you at perhaps $500-$750 at the low end, and that will be enough to get started shooting sports if you are shooting outside during the day.

I will warn you at the outset that sports photography can be an expensive passion. The midrange camera bodies and lenses are on the order of $1K each, and the ones the pros use are in the $4K-$7K range for the bodies or lenses.

I started with a Canon Rebel XT (about $750 at the time), and a Canon 28-135 F4.5-5.6 zoom lens (say, $300).

Or, “so you want to take pictures of your kids”…

I’ve spent the fast few years teaching myself how to do sports photography, so I could take pictures of my daughter’s soccer and lacrosse teams. Or, to be more correct, progressing from “really bad at sports photography” to “okay at sports photography”.

I found a few sources on the way to help me out, and I’d like to pass on some of the tips that I’ve either been told or found out along the way, and with a bit of luck – and a lot of practice – you’ll be producing some nice images of your own in no time.

I’m going to talk about things in rough order of complexity – I’ll start out with the things that are more basic and move towards the more complex (and/or expensive) ones.

I hope you find this helpful…