Photography Tips: Action Photography
The world is full of movement. How can you capture this in a single image with your camera? There are two ways: either record a blurred image to convey the impression of motion, or “freeze” the image to capture a moment in time. Successful action photography requires a mixture of understanding your camera, technique and practice.
Exposure time
To understand how to take action photos, it is important to understand movement in terms of exposure times. If your subject is absolutely still and your camera is on a solid tripod, the shutter speed you use is not that important. One second or 1/1,000 second will give similar results – at least as far as the sharpness of the subject is concerned.
Now imagine there is a horse running in front of the camera with an average speed of 16 km/h. In one second, the horse will have moved almost five metres! If you use an exposure time of one second, the horse will appear as a blur across the image. This technique can actually be quite effective, providing a strong impression of movement.
An exposure time of one second might be a little extreme in that situation, but shutter speeds around 1/15th of a second are worth trying. The horse will have moved about 30 cm in that time producing a creative “motion blur” image. If, on the other hand, you want the horse to appear motionless, you could try a shutter speed of 1/1,000th of a second. In this brief moment, the horse will have barely moved during the exposure.
The impact of aperture and ISO
If you set a faster shutter speed, less light gets to the digital sensor on your camera and the image will be underexposed. To compensate, you need a wider lens aperture and/or a higher ISO speed setting. A lens with a large maximum aperture allows you to set a faster shutter speed and expose correctly.
Many prime (non-zoom) lenses available for Canon EOS cameras have maximum apertures of f/2.8 or wider and are popular with sports photographers. If you don’t have one of these lenses, you can set a higher ISO value, making the sensor more sensitive to light. The downside of this can be an increase in “noise” or coloured speckles across the image.
Panning your camera with the action
It is possible to obtain a sharp image of a moving subject even at slow shutter speeds. This is done by “panning” the camera or moving the camera so that the subject remains in the same position on the sensor during the exposure. It works best with a subject moving at a constant speed in one direction, such as a bird in flight or a motorcycle on a racetrack. A good pan shot reverses the normal action situation – the subject is sharp, but the background is blurred. Some subjects can be sharp and blurred at the same time. The body of a bird in flight, for example, will be sharp, but the wings moving up and down will be blurred. It is important to find the right positon for panning; your subject should be the same distance from you throughout your shot.
Good panning takes practice and more practice. One trick is to keep panning after pressing the shutter release, so that the pan becomes a smooth movement.
Sports photography
One subject where there is usually a lot of movement and action is sports. Track events are predictable; you know where the athletes are going to run. If you are at right angles to the track, you can use a slower shutter speed and the panning technique to keep them sharp as they move across the field of view. If you get close to the track and aim your camera down the lanes as the athletes run toward you, a faster shutter speed is required.
Football, soccer and rugby played on a field are more difficult to cover because the action moves quickly around a large area. If you are close to the sidelines, the players might be very close at one moment and in a far corner the next. Use a faster shutter speed for close shots to freeze the action, as movement appears faster when nearby.
You don’t need to be at major sporting events to shoot good pictures. Look for local sporting events where the spectators are allowed to stand on the sidelines and cheer on their team. The action will be just as strong and your viewpoints will be better. Remember, practice makes perfect!
Experiment and discover
Most photographers will shoot action pictures at one time or another, whether it’s with their kids at play, a local sports event or busy street scenes while on holiday. It is possible to calculate the shutter speed needed to “freeze” action by estimating the speed of the action, the direction in relation to the camera, the distance from the camera and the focal length of the lens. But by the time you do all that, you will have missed the shot.
It is much better to take lots of pictures, ideally with different exposures, and review the results when you have the time. Digital images record the shutter speed at the time of the exposure, and most imaging software will show you this (EXIF) information (along with aperture, ISO setting and other data). Learn from what worked so that setting your camera correctly comes naturally.
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