The Basics Of Digital Photography Of Sports

Most digital cameras have a "Sports" of "Action" mode that help you to clearly capture the fast moving action of sporting events. In the digital photography of sport the user has a much larger l role to play than in other types of photography as the timing of the photos have to be perfect - and there is just a split second in which to take it.


If you are taking photos of a game being played on a large field, you have two ways of going about it. Your first option is to follow the action as it moves around the field with your camera ready to take the photo the moment the action you want to capture occurs - this is the best way of taking picture of sports where the action can occur anywhere, like hockey and football. In the case of sports like basket ball and baseball where there are a few points where the action you want to record will occur, the option for you is to keep the camera focused on a particular point - the batter of the basket - and be ready to take the picture when the action happens.


However, no matter how quick your reflexes are in pressing the shutter button, there will be a time lag from the time you press the button to the time the picture is taken as the camera will need to adjust its setting. This may take only a few tenths of a second, but that is enough for you to miss the exact moment you want to capture - how long does a slam dunk take? You can solve this problem by keeping the shutter button pressed half way so that the camera is always in the auto focus mode and no time will be lost between the pressing of the button and the shutter action. Another option is to use the "Burst" (or equivalent) mode where the camera will take continuous photos as long as the button remains pressed. You will get a chain of pictures of the event and can then pick the best ones to keep.


Another cause of camera delays in the digital photography of sports is that until the previous photos has been written to the memory card, the next one cannot be taken - a memory card with a slow write time will delay the taking of your next picture. Always use memory cards with a fast write time to reduce the time delay between pictures.