Most of my photography has been of relatively stationary subjects, where I just use single-servo AF and either focus & recompose or move the single focus point to where in the frame I want the subject, or largely-individual sports like triathlon. But I’ve struggled getting sharp shots in team sports photography with a large number of moving people in frame.
If I try using continuous autofocus, it often focuses on the wrong subject or the background or seemingly nothing at all. If I try falling back on the techniques that work in other contexts, I usually just can’t get the shot off at the right time.
I don’t really understand the different autofocus options on my camera. I was mostly using what it calls “3D”, but I also briefly tried “group-area”. I don’t really understand how group-area differs from d9 or even 3D. And my camera’s manual doesn’t clear things up for me. I spent a little while in manual autofocus with a fairly closed aperture, by using autofocus and then switching to manual and leaving it untouched; but this only worked when play stayed roughly the same distance from the camera for a while, so didn’t really scale well.
Separate from the focus question, I spent the afternoon shooting at 1/1600. I’m not completely sure if this is fast enough, and maybe some of the blur in my photos is actually better explained by camera shake (shooting at 200 mm on a 1.5x crop sensor) or movement of the subjects. I suspect it’s probably not relevant, but I thought I’d mention it just in case.
What’s the best advice for how to get sharp shots in team sports photography?
(Included photo is a SOOC jpeg of a set play on the opposite side of the field from where I was…a situation that minimised my chance of focus problems.)
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First, keep your camera in AF-C and shoot in bursts. Bursts do two things: increase the odds of getting a sharp photo and maximize the chances of capturing just-the-right moment (for example, a catch). Do not use AF-S. I suggest not attempting manual focus, but you do you if that’s what you’re into.
3D is what Nikon called “tracking” on their DSLR bodies. It tracks your subject as it moves around somewhat decently. I’m not sure how well it works on a D7500 with lots of potential subjects, but the idea is that you put the focus box over your intended subject, engage tracking, and the camera will follow the subject around as it moves. You can learn how this works easily in your house. Put a cup on a counter, engage tracking, and pan the camera around while keeping the cup in frame. Your camera should keep a focus box over the cup. If it doesn’t, odds are you didn’t engage tracking so try again until you get a feel for it.
I would use either 3D tracking or single point AF. For single point AF, simply keep the focus box over your subject and you can basically guarantee it will be in focus. Assuming your lens can focus fast enough, you can’t miss. This is how I shot 95% of auto racing, along with youth sports before I got a long lens for my new (to me) FF body. You really can’t miss if the focus box is over your intended subject and there’s nothing obscuring your line of sight.
Do not use auto area, 9 point, etc because you’re going to want to control where the camera is focusing when there are lots of people on the field. Most cameras will generally go for the closest subject, but the action point could be behind them.
The minimum required shutter speed depends on the pace of action, as well as whether or not you’re trying to introduce some blur intentionally (eg motorsports). 1/1000 is probably a good starting point. Evaluate your photos and go from there. I can’t imagine that the 1/1600 you were shooting at was the cause of soft photos, unless you have fairly pronounced hand tremors.
What lens are you using? You’re going to want a decent amount of reach. I’m a big fan of the Nikon AF-S 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR on a crop body and used it for many years on my D5300. It is a FX lens, but the focus is fast and accurate, the VR is good, it’s pretty light for what it is, and since you’re using the center of a full frame image circle on your DX body you’re going to have zero vignetting. I shot it 100% hand held and never had any issues doing so.
I’ve recently started taking photos at youth sports and I can tell you that you’ll want the reach if you’re at any distance from your subject. I often wound up 100-115 feet from home plate and spent quite a bit of time at the 500mm end of my 150-500 lens on my current FF body.
Assuming your lens is sharp wide open, set your camera to S and let the camera manage ISO and aperture as needed. Don’t step down unless you have to. Unless you have a fast prime, odds are you’ll need all the light you can get.
Finally, know the sport you’re shooting, anticipate the action, and if you can move around try to position yourself so you’ll have good line of sight on that action. Players looking in your direction is ideal, but you’ll at least want to be able to see their eyes looking at whatever they’re focusing on. Bonus points if that thing is also in frame.
shoot in bursts
Oh definitely! It makes reviewing photos afterwards a pain, but it’s definitely worth it. Never could have gotten anywhere near as many good shots without it—or even with burst mode on my older D3100 which only burst about 3 photos per second.
3D is what Nikon called “tracking” on their DSLR bodies. It tracks your subject as it moves around somewhat decently. I’m not sure how well it works on a D7500 with lots of potential subjects, but the idea is that you put the focus box over your intended subject, engage tracking, and the camera will follow the subject around as it moves
Do not use auto area, 9 point, etc because you’re going to want to control where the camera is focusing when there are lots of people on the field. Most cameras will generally go for the closest subject, but the action point could be behind them.
Ah yeah thanks! This is precisely the sort of advice I was looking for.
What lens are you using? You’re going to want a decent amount of reach. I’m a big fan of the Nikon AF-S 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR on a crop body and used it for many years on my D5300.
55–200 f/4.0–5.6, and while I wouldn’t mind a faster or faster-focusing lens, I think that’s the perfect focal length for what I’m doing. I took a decent chunk of 55–69 mm photos, and while the 200 mm photos sometimes would have benefited from an even longer focal length, it wasn’t so bad that cropping in post isn’t viable. I’m not producing wall-sized prints! A 70–300 would be perfect if my camera were full-frame though. But here I’m trying to shoot a football-type sport and I’m able to get a metre or two from the sideline.
I’ve tried shooting cricket a couple of times, and there I’m pretty sure even 450 mm (35 mm equivalent) wouldn’t be sufficient. A field can be easily 90+ m across with the pitch right in the centre, and even at an amateur level the players don’t usually like you being directly in front of where the batsman’s facing.
Assuming your lens is sharp wide open, set your camera to S and let the camera manage ISO and aperture as needed
I’m actually thinking M with auto-ISO might be the way to go in the future, to lock the shutter speed nice and fast and force it to keep the lens open, but still react well to when the play goes under shadow. The wide aperture is more necessary for style than for light though, because the sun is super bright.
Anyway, thanks a heap for all the advice there. It’s very helpful!
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Any reason not to use shutter priority mode?
Mainly just to force the lens to stay wide open even if play moves from a shaded area into the bright sun.
But yeah you might be right. The autofocus on my lens seems to be reasonably quick, but that just might not be good enough for quick sudden movements in play. I’ll have to practise and play around to see if it’s a user problem or an equipment problem. In the latter case I may have to stop down. In which case manual with auto-ISO becomes even more important.
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Uhh, mods, why did this get removed? It seemed like entirely reasonable advice to me when I skimmed over it before.
Glad you found the reply helpful!
It sounds like you have the right lens for your situation. With sports I feel like you’re always going to be compromising on focal length (too tight for close action, too wide for far action). It sounds like you’re reviewing your EXIF info, so you can certainly use past data to help inform what focal length you’re using the most.
I would personally lean on shutter priority unless you can guarantee that you’ll never over-expose. Clipped highlights obviously aren’t recoverable. I don’t know that I trust myself enough to watch the histogram and we’ve had many games that were partly sunny - oscillating between direct and indirect sun. It would be nice to be able to say “increase shutter speed if necessary otherwise bump ISO” but that’s sadly not a real shooting mode.
My 150-500 is a fairly slow lens, but since it’s on a FF body it’s amazing what it can see through. Chain link fences don’t completely disappear, but they’re a lot less visible than they were on my somewhat faster 70-300 on a crop body.
Shutter speed is only half the equation. What’s your aperture set to? If you shoot wife-open (lowest f number) on a fast lens (e.g. f/1.4), the area that is in focus will be too shallow, and the camera’s AF will have trouble locking onto fast moving subjects. Step it down to f/4-f/8 to get more of the area in focus,and get the shutter even faster to 1/4000 or even 1/8000 to freeze the motion. Of course if you’re shooting indoors that would require cranking up the ISO to compensate, which may introduce noise. It’s a matter of finding the right balance.
So, ideally I’d like to keep the aperture wide precisely because I want the low depth-of-field. As it happens my lens isn’t a very fast one (55–200 mm f/4.0–5.6), and a fair few of my photos were stopped down to around f/6–8 anyway, especially the ones where I had switched to manual, but the reason I was asking for assistance on how to nail the focus is to help get the sharpest subject I can and be able to keep a nice soft background.
With max shutter speed (looks to be 1/8000 on your D7500) try following your subject while shooting (a.k.a. panning), and you should get nice motion blur on the background like this: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/4af1e0_0c4400474dff4f94a8873a2d235b1139~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_1280,h_720,al_c,q_90/4af1e0_0c4400474dff4f94a8873a2d235b1139~mv2.webp
https://digital-photography-school.com/6-tips-master-panning-photography/
Also to keep in mind that many consumer grade lenses get soft at their max zoom levels.
Panning to blur the background is definitely a technique I’ve done before when shooting triathlons & cycling. It works great! Though I don’t want to be anywhere near max shutter speed to get it to work. Needs to be well under (or above? What’s the correct terminology here lol. Slower than.) 1/1000. But I’m not sure that it’s a technique that really translates to team field sports where players’ movements are so much less predictable.
consumer grade lenses get soft at their max zoom levels
Oh that’s very interesting. I did not know that! Thanks.
There’s no way that shot was taken with 1/8000th of a second, that would result in pretty much no motion blur. That F1 shot was probably taken closer to 1/50th
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I’m using Nikon’s 55–200 mm f/4.0–5.6 VR. When play was on the opposite side of the field I definitely wish I had a longer lens, but when it was close to me, having the shorter end of that scale was crucial. Of the 354 photos I took, 50 were at 55 mm, and 4 more were above 55 but below 70 mm. (16 of 77 after my first pass). And I can always crop down when I want the far side photos to have larger subjects. I think the 70–300 would make more sense if the camera were full frame.
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Interestingly, I’ve read that with VR teles, switching off the VR will actually get you slightly faster AF
Oh, good tip, thanks!
If your camera supports it you can try registering faces to prioritize the auto focus for a few of the standout players.
If your camera doesn’t have any ibis and you’re shooting with a crop at 200mm I think maybe you’re right that 1600 isn’t quite fast enough. You could go higher or maybe try out a monopod to help stabilize.
There should be a tracking AF option where you can select a focus point and then let the camera track the point but your camera may not have that option either.
If no tracking AF try using a larger point. My camera calls it zone AF where it focuses on one of the 9 boxes made by the lines of thirds.
It could also be a “get good” situation where you just have to anticipate a little of what might happen and try to be ready for shots a few seconds ahead of time. Practice makes perfect after all.
I hope that maybe this helps!
Sometimes I shoot ibis, though personally I prefer curlews, but I don’t think the camera has any ibis inside of it.
Nah but seriously, the camera body doesn’t have stabilisation, but my long lens does. I’ve finished my first pass through the photos in the time between posting the OP and now, and yeah I think you’re right that especially when I’m zoomed in all the way, a faster shutter speed would help—I’m a little more confident now that some of the blur was shake.
It could also be a “get good” situation where you just have to anticipate a little of what might happen
Oh 100% this was part of it. Reviewing my photos, a lot of them it’s very noticeable that had I hit the shutter a fraction of a second earlier, the photo would have been better, from a composition/subject perspective, and I’m sure anticipating where the action will go so I know which subject to try and set the autofocus to be focused on would help even further.
But right now I’m struggling to get the camera to stay locked on focus to a subject even when I do know I want to be focused on them. I believe Nikon’s “3D” AF is a kind of tracking mode, and from my reading I think 9d (or “9-point dynamic-area”) and group-area might be tracking of some form, too. But they’re distinct from the face- and subject-tracking AF modes that are available only in live-view (looking at the display screen), when I’m mostly shooting through the viewfinder because it’s much, much more responsive. Even if that wasn’t a problem, I think the need to actually select an object to track and keep changing which subject would put it back at the start. Still a “get good” situation, but more about getting good with understanding camera features and using them appropriately, rather than just with the more creative side.
Unrelated to the main question, I’d love any quick feedback on how to improve composition and get great photos in sports photography once the technical elements are sorted, if anyone has advice on that front.
With sports, capturing the action takes front seat to composition. That said, you’re going to generally want to be up or downfield from the action so people are facing you when the action inevitably comes your way.
If you have enough light, close your aperture to something like f10 or higher, and increase your ISO to some value where you’re comfortable with the noise, like 6400. Test different shutter speeds depending on the action that you’re trying to capture, but the small aperture will help with the focus.
Maybe try manual focusing too, at small apertures you can set a large focus plane that will capture all the action.
