With the school year underway, I decided to step outside of my usually wildlife imagery and challenge you with something different.  Therefore, this week’s photo assignment is sports.  Here in Texas high school football is in full swing (despite the 95 degree weather) along with girls’ volleyball, soccer, and cross country.  Over the past four years I have become the official sports photographer for The Winston School San Antonio and it is always a creative challenge to produce quality sports images.  It also has the advantage of keeping my wildlife photography skills in practice as the overlap between sports and wildlife photography is considerable.

Sports photography offers a great opportunity to try your hand at capturing drama, victory, defeat, and good sportsmanship.  Sports contain the opportunity to capture both obvious and subtle images.  While most photographers will try to catch the quarterback breaking through the line and scoring a touchdown or be prepared for the devastating spike on the volleyball court, many will miss the side-stories that make compelling images in their own right.  The cheer that goes up when a touchdown is scored.  The high fives that are exchanged following a great tackle.  The exhaustion at the end of a hard won game.  The coach pushing her players to never give up.  Sports offer drama on many levels and it is your job to capture that drama on film.

On the technical side, sports involve action, so fast shutter speeds are important.  Modern camera can do amazing things at high ISO settings, so don’t be afraid to crank it up.  Also, a good zoom lens can be very helpful in framing as the players move around.  Good luck.

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This week’s photo assignment is about recording motion.  Photographically speaking, motion can be recorded two ways: frozen or blurred.  Sharp motion images are fairly straight forward and easy to produce when combined with a fast shutter speed and good timing.  Successful blurred motion shots, on the other hand, are much more difficult to create.  In this assignment, our goal is to use panning techniques to incorporate a sense of motion into the images.  Panning is a technique whereby a slow shutter speed is combined with fluid tracking of the subject to produce a blurred image in which the subject is still recognizable.  The result is the creation of a sense of motion in a still image.

The first key to panning involves selecting the correct shutter speed.  To successfully pan, the camera’s shutter speed must be set to a fairly slow setting.  The ideal setting will vary with each pan, depending on the subject’s speed.  Slower subjects will require slower shutter speeds to enhance the blurring effect.  With fairly quick moving subjects (running animals or moving cars) I usually recommend shutter speeds in the 1/10 – 1/15 of a second.  This is a good starting point from which you can experiment to find the best results.

The second key to creating good pan motion shots involves tracking the subject.  Rather then holding still, panning requires that the photographer follows the subject while taking the shot.  Usually a smooth twisting of the hips while shooting is all it takes to keep the subject within the frame.  A frequent mistake photographers make is to stop tracking the subject as they press the shutter button.  This ruins the smooth blurring effect we are after.  For a pan to work, it is essential that the movements be smooth and continue until after all of the images have been taken.  One great way to combat this tendency is to fire multiple frames of the subject as you pan.  Don’t settle for a single image when you can create multiple images to choose from (you never know which frame will be the best).

Good pan motion images are not easy to produce, but when successful they help to depict movement in a unique way to brings a sense of motion and energy to the image.

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