Photography Tips

Action & Sports Photography Settings Tips from Aperture to Manual to Shutter Priority Exposure Modes

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Florida high school baseball action shot using aperture priority - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/4 ISO 320 1/3200I am a self-taught photographer with a careful ear for picking up photography knowledge from a variety of sources.  If you browse my work you can see that you can teach yourself to make photographs that people will eventually pay you for.  However, I spend a long time grinding away teaching myself, starting with making thousands of images in Japan over a 6-month period when I first got a DSLR, then for several years back here in Florida.  I would not recommend this method!  That is why I have been offering 1-on-1 photography lessons to teach people in 2-hours what it took me 2+ years to formulate and define.  Taking a lesson or class from a competent photography teacher is a great way to jump start your shooting skills.

So the weekly photography tips I post on this site are part of sharing the practical photography knowledge I gained grinding through those years out in the field, and the knowledge I continue to increase by now shooting paying jobs as a full-time pro photographer.  

In this post you can see action and sports shots that span this window of knowledge.

The baseball photo above was made I believe on my very first sports assignment, so you can say it is the epitome of beginner's luck!  Looking at the settings I used for the shot I would definitely yell at myself for that now.  I was shooting action in aperture priority, probably never the best choice, had my ISO at 320 during daylight, and the shutter speed was way faster than it needed to be.  

Horse jumping in Venice Florida - Aperture Priority - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/5.6 ISO 400 1/1600Early on in my time in Florida I also photographed horse jumping a good bit.  You can see by my settings I was making progress, even though still using aperture priority mode.  My ISO was still above the minimum even during daylight, but if I recall at that time I thought I needed that very fast shutter speed of 1/1600th to freeze the action, and to get a good exposure I had to increase the ISO.  Clouds would come and go and settings often needed to be tweaked, but choosing aperture priority and letting the camera adjust the shutter speed on the fly was definitely not the way to go.  I should have been using shutter priority mode.

Triathlon cycling in St. Petersburg Florida - Manual Exposure - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/4 ISO 640 1/1250Now we are jumping ahead two years to when I photographed the St. Anthony's Triathlon in St. Petersburg Florida.  I was now comfortable and competent shooting action & sports in any exposure mode.  Why did I choose manual mode then?  At this time the cyclists were coming by in consistent light (no sun going behind clouds).  I was photographing them as they passed by the exact same spot on the road too, therefore there was only one set of settings that produced the best exposure.  So I locked those in with manual exposure mode.  Why did I use the settings I did?  Well the cyclists were going really, really fast so 1/500th was not freezing them, so I used 1/1250.  I used f/4 because that fast shutter speed required I let a lot of light in, but I wanted to retain some depth of field and better sharpeness, so I did not use the maximum aperture of f/2.8 of my lens.  So having aperture and shutter speed restricted by the nature of the subject matter, to get the exposure I wanted I then had to increase my ISO to 640.  This was not the middle of the day, but rather just shortly after sunrise.  As the sun went up, I could gradually decrease the ISO I was using.

Pelican in flight - shutter priority - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/5.6 ISO 200 1/1250In this pelican shot you can see my full progress in shooting action shots.  I was using shutter priority mode, had my ISO at its lowest setting, and set the shutter speed to be plenty fast enough to freeze even the bird's wing tips.  The camera was choosing the aperture for me on the fly, and getting consistent f/5.6 results allowed for very good sharpness and depth of field.

So now I would recommend using only manual or shutter priority mode for sports and actions shots.  If no lighting conditions are changing, then lock things in with manual.  If lighting is changing due to shifting cloud cover, or the subject moving across different foreground and/or background light, then use shutter priority mode.  

Of course the minimum shutter speed to use for any action shots, or any moving subjects, is 1/500th and you must also use AF-C (Ai Servo) focus mode.  Both of those are musts.  As you can see from my above examples, though, other settings and parameters remain variables, and there may be multiple ways to get the same shot, but some settings combos are much better to use than others!

Photography Tip - get the subject's head above the horizon

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This photography tip is a long time in coming as it is one of the things that bothers me the most, that being having the horizon cut right through the subject's head in portrait photography.  Living in Florida there is never a beach very far away, meaning there is a distinct horizon in the background of photographs.  When composing a portrait, I always make sure the subject's head is above the horizon for a single subject.  Sometimes in group shots with very tall people and kids mixed, it is not always entirely possible, but for sure I will have the adult's heads above the horizon.  

So when you are out shooting on the beach next time, or anywhere that the horizon can clearly be seen, be sure to get the subject's head above the horizon.  The horizon going through the head of the subject is very distracting.  Just get lower when shooting to avoid this.  When photographing children, like in the example above, you may have to get quite low, often going on to one knee.  It is worth it though!

Photography Tip - shoot vertical subjects in portrait orientation

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Photography Tip - for vertical and/or tall subjects shoot in portrait orientationWhen I first moved back to Florida some years ago now, I went to an early morning photo review with a local photography Meetup group.  I brought my print portfolio with me and the piece of feedback I received that stuck most in my mind was that I had no shots in portrait orientation.  My print portfolio was of course a very small sample of my work, but from then on whenver I went out to shoot I had in my mind think about shooting in portrait orientation.  This means holding the camera vertically, rather than the more natural horizontal (landscape orientation) position.

Since that time my photography experience has greatly increased and I have been teaching photography lessons for years.  In those lessons I see the same thing with many students, almost never shooting in portrait orientation.  One way to start to train yourself to shoot in this orientation more is to first try and photography vertical subjects in it.  

In my above photo of a flag pole, the tall nature of the subject naturally fills the frame from top to bottom when shooting in portait orientation.  I chose to make the subject off center as well with the flags blowing into the empty (negative) space.  Had I made this shot in landscape orientation, there likely would have been too much negative space resulting in the subject getting lost in the frame.

Photography Tip - anchor your photo composition with a foreground subject

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Use a foreground object to anchor the composition of your photographs.One way to improve photograph composition is to use an anchor in the foreground.  This foreground object will give the viewer a place to start looking and then keep their eyes on the photograph.  If the sailboat in the above shot was not there, then it would just be a loose photograph of some water and sky with nothing to grab the viewer's eye.  Having an anchor adds strength to an image.  In composing landscape shots especially, try to include an anchor in the foreground.

Photography Tip - which lens do I use?

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These are 3 of my own lenses, how do I choose which one to shoot with?My photography students often ask me, "which lens should I use?"  To me that question does not make much sense because there is usually no question about which lens to use.  Plus, without a lot more information, the question cannot even be answered.  The real problem is that many people start by asking which lens, or which settings should I use instead of starting with, what is the subject?  That is the question that needs to be asked first and answering it makes which lens to use usually pretty obvious.

Once you determine your subject, then simply choose the lens that fits that subject within the framing you want.  If you want to photograph some friends in your living room, it does not make much sense to use a 70-200mm lens does it as you will not be able to fit everyone in the frame.  Likewise, if you want to photograph a mountain top in the distance, using a 17-50mm lens does not make much sense as you will hardly even be able to see the intended subject in the frame.  

So what your subject is, and how much of your subject you want to get in the frame, dictates which lens you should shoot with.  

Snow Leopard Photoshop edit removing cage fencing from photograph

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This week one of my former photography students, Betty, contacted me about editing a photo she made that she really liked, but had one serious flaw.  She told me she wanted to be able to make a print of a photograph of a snow leopard she had made, but.....there was facing across the entire image.  She asked if I could remove it.  Upon first looking at the sample she sent I thought no way, at least not in a way that would look good.  However, I often think this initially when looking at a challenging photo edit and after some time my brain starts to formulate some possible solutions.  Still, there was one fatal part of the photo that could not be fixed, the cat's right eye.

Lines and blemishes over and across simple surfaces are usually not hard to correct, such as the case with the wires goings over the fur of the leopard.  However, anything over eyes basically provides an unfixable problem.  After some thinking....my solution?  Copy the cat's left eye, mirror it, and just put it over the problematic right eye!  

It worked better than I thought it would.  To add some differences I removed some reflections in the "new" right eye along with a few changes to the upper eye brow area.  I will not say removing the rest of the wiring was easy or simple, but those edits were a much more straight forward technique of first using the healing brush and then the clone stamp tool to clean up any lingering obvious edits.  Photoshop CS5 was used for these major lifting edits, as I call them.

After removing all the wiring I then applied my normal digital editing workflow to the image to produce the final, fully edited photograph above.  So the next time you think a photograph is impossible to fix in Photoshop, give it a few minutes and maybe a solution will come to you.  Or, send the photo to me as I offer digital photo editing services of all kinds.

Portrait Photograph Tip - set the focus on the eyes

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When making a portrait, set the focus on the eyes, then recompose.I always use a single focus point when photographing still subjects.  Most of the time I keep that single focus point in the center, and the recompose how I want the final image to look.  Of course for shooting still subjects I use AF-S (one shot) focus mode.  So when making portraits using the settings described previously, I set the focus on the subject's eyes, then recompose because the most important thing with a portrait is getting the eyes in focus.  

Very rarely do I center subjects, and in a portrait the eyes of the subject are not very likely to end up perfectly centered as well.  In the above shot I first put my center focus point on the subject's eyes, then recomposed to put her eyes in the upper third of the frame (also her right eye ends exactly at the right horizontal third).

So when making portraits, set the focus on the eyes, then recompose how you like.