Sports photography–state soccer game

I started out my photography career as a sports photographer.  That’s what I wanted to do.  And that’s where I was headed.  Until people started asking me to take photos of their kids and their families and their weddings.  And while I have drifted away from photographing a lot of sports, it’s still where my heart started.  I love every minute of it.

I played high school soccer at Alta High.  My high school soccer coach is still the coach at Alta and has now won 14 State soccer championships.  I love seeing him (and his other coaches–one of whom was my goalkeeper when I played) win over and over and over.  It never gets old.

I wanted to share some photos from their game along with some tips to help some of you take better photos of your kids who play sports!

I’ll start with a few quick tips:

*A huge key to taking good photos of sports is understanding the sport.  Being able to anticipate where the ball will go and who it will go to can make a big difference in whether you get the shot or not.  If you don’t know the rules and don’t really know what’s going on, it will be hard to know where the action will be.

*Along with action photos, look for detail shots as well.  Ones that create emotions and show all aspects of playing a team sport. Having played sports, I know I would love to have more photos of me with my teammates on the sidelines, before and after games, doing cheers, with the coaches, etc. The “emotional” part of the sport is part of the story as well.

*Pan with the subject instead of them moving towards you. This keeps the same distance between you and your subject. So they’re moving parallel to you instead of perpendicular (throwin’ it back to geometry days in 7th grade). If the subject is moving towards you, the focus point is changing constantly and makes it much harder to keep them in focus.

*Try to capture your action photos at the height of the action. To do that, you have to take a LOT of pictures really fast. To do this, you need to shoot in continuous mode on your camera.

*Give the action room to “move” in the photo. You don’t want to lead the eye off the picture. Leave some space for the action to move into.

*Don’t just take photos of your own kid.  They’ll be grateful one day to have photos of their team mates as well.

*I don’t think you need to take photos at every single game.  Pick a few of the big games during the season and take some photos at those.  Try to pick one game where you tell the full story of the game.  Then just sit and enjoy the rest of the games knowing you’ve already got some great photos.

*In order to have full control of your camera, you have to shoot in manual mode or a priority mode (aperture priority or shutter priority). You need to be able to control the focus points on your camera. If your camera chooses where to focus, it will generally focus on the closest thing or the wrong thing.  By shooting in a manual mode, you can choose which focal point to use.  I nearly always use the center focal point. (You can learn how to do this in your camera manual)

*I shot all of these photos in aperture priority mode with my aperture set at f2.8 using a 70-200mm lens.

 

And now The 2015 5A Utah State Soccer Champions–Alta Hawks–in pictures (and a few more specific tips):

 

Sometimes it’s hard to get the action photos you want in the middle of the game.  Get there a little early and take some photos while the team is warming up.  You can get great action shots this way and are often able to get a little closer than you would be able to during an actual game.

Get some photos of pre-game stuff.  Captains, Refs, the team cheer, detail shots, the field they’re playing on, the entire team if you can.

And then comes the action shots during the game.

I know him well enough, I can actually hear him yelling in this photo.  Love it.  He’ll protect his players even if it costs him a red card.

And then the after game celebrations (or defeat–photographing how a team handles loss is a great story as well) and post-game hand shakes.

I also recommend taking some video at the games you photograph.  Wins like this never get old.