How to Photograph Kids Sports

December and January means we get busy with minor hockey tournaments.

This year, we saw more families than ever with new, digital SLR cameras, many with hi-def video capture. As a result, we had more people ask us about the creative and technical aspects of shooting kids’ sports, and hockey in particular.

A few ideas and plenty of practice can go a long way to helping you get “keepers” in the rink or on the field.

How To Set Up That New DSLR for Sports

From a technical viewpoint, you need to pay attention to some key points. Probably the biggest will be speed. For most sports, we use a minimum shutter speed of 1/400th of a second. That’s minimum. As a rule, faster is better. If you can shoot at 1/800th or faster you’ll get crisper images, with little motion blur.

To get a fast shutter you need plenty of light. Most minor hockey rinks and community gyms don’t have much light. That means you’ll need to “turn your camera up.” When you increase your ISO setting you make your camera more sensitive to light. While you can shoot at low ISO settings of 100 to 400 in bright sunlight, indoor minor sports venues require ISO settings of 1600 or higher.

Don’t even think about using a flash. It’s useless, and it’s dangerous for the athletes.

What About Exposure?

The other factor that governs the amount of light that hits the sensor is lens aperture. The aperture is the opening at the back of the lens through which light passes on its way to the camera sensor. The size of the opening is measured in f-stops.

Low numbers, such as f2.8 mean the aperture is wide open. High numbers such as f16 mean the aperture is closed down to a small opening. Most of the time, when we shoot minor hockey, we leave the aperture wide open, to get the most light in. This lets us use the fastest shutter speed in the relatively low-light environment of a community arena.

At an ISO of 1600, and an aperture of f2.8, it’s usually possible to get 1/400 or 1/500 of a second shutter speed.

Ideally, if you own one of the newer DSLR cameras, you can get a faster ISO setting without too much “noise” – the grainy confetti that shows up in pictures shot at high ISO settings in older cameras. DSLR makers have done a great deal to advance noise reduction systems over the past few years. So if your camera is pretty new, chances are you can make your ISO setting 2500 or even higher (as I do with my Canon 1D MK IV), then set your ISO at 3200. That way you can always go for faster shutter speeds.

This does, of course, depend on your camera’s capabilities, as well as your personal preference. However, at present in most indoor sports settings, an ISO between 1600 and 3200 with a shutter speed of 1/400 to 1/1000 through an f2.8 aperture gives you good results.

Which Lens Works Best?

Probably, if your new DSLR came as a kit, you have a single lens. For most people, this lens will prove inadequate for good sports shooting. It will likely have a maximum aperture of f4.0, not large enough to allow adequate light at reasonable ISO settings to make a shutter speed that will freeze action. In almost all circumstance, you’re going to want to use a lens with an f2.8 aperture.

In addition, kit lenses tend to be short to medium focal lengths, with insufficient telephoto power to get the close-up perspective you’ll want in most cases. We recommend upgrading your lens to a f2.8 telephoto zoom, ideally stabilized. These can get rather expensive, especially if you want to pay the OEM label gear. There are, however, a number of good third-party lens makers such as Sigma, Tokina and others who sell their lenses for less.

Used gear is also a good way to go. Always try to test used gear, or get a friendly neighborhood camera shop pro to have a look at it before you commit to buy. A lens that has been dropped, for example, may have elements out of alignment, require costly repair, or worse.

For most of indoor sports shooting we rely on a 70-200mm f2.8 stabilized lens. Occasionally we use others, but the workhorse of the bag is the 70-200.

How To Compose for Sports / Action

From a compositional perspective we can offer a few tips. First, new shooters tend to shoot too wide. That is, they don’t zoom in close enough to their subject. The result is their subject appears as a tiny, nondescript object in the frame. Without a good telephoto lens, it’s impossible to get close enough from the seating area around gyms and rinks.

Second, pick your subject. Ask yourself which player or players are you covering. Minor sports tends to be pretty chaotic, with a lot of bodies clustered around the puck or ball. So while you may think you’re getting a great shot of your son or daughter, everybody else will see a tangle of arms and legs with little impact.

So how do you get your child separated from the chaos? The answer is light, framing and action.

Many minor sports venues have inconsistent lighting. If you take a moment to look, you’ll see dark and light patches throughout the venue. We typically try to compose where a player moves into a pool of light, or a brighter area in the frame. It’s often useful to practice framing in these areas, even when the play is elsewhere. Look at the background. Does your framing make sense? Are there strong horizontal and vertical elements in the composition that work to frame the action? Is the background lighter or darker than your foreground? Will the player’s face be lit or in shadow when the enter the frame?

Effectively, by asking these questions, you create a setting in which your subject can engage in action. The simplest form is a solo player moving through the frame. No confusion about subject there. The next, and often most interesting composition involves two players or perhaps three) in head to head conflict. Battling for a puck, intercepting a passed ball, the good body check… you get the idea. Players in conflict often yield the most physically dramatic and emotionally poignant moments.

So in brief, a clearly defined subject in a strong setting at a dramatic moment. This will make your pictures more meaningful.

Practically Speaking…

So what do you do if you don’t want to shell out for a telephoto lens? The you have to position yourself so you can get the coverage you want of your subject in a good setting, which means you will need to choose a smaller area of the playing surface to focus on.

In hockey, this usually means the corners of the rink where you can cover action along the boards and around the goal mouth. Other sports have other areas. What you don’t want to do is try to cover the far end of a large playing surface with a short lens. So, using a short lens can give you some pretty cool images if you remember the compositional basics we talked about above and pick your spot so you can get the shot.

That’s really about all there is to it, from a technique perspective. Of course, getting the truly spectacular shot requires practice, patience and luck.

Next time, we’ll talk about the art of shooting kids sports.