September 12, 2009 - Emma's first tennis match

1/3200

f2.8

ISO 400

200mm

JPEG

Emma and Leigh Ann got to play in a practice match today. This was the first time for Emma. She is just starting to learn the game, but she does a really good job of hitting the ball. She just needs to keep working on getting into position to hit. She did that here.

I shot in JPEG mode so I could get a bunch of shots (my camera in RAW mode will shoot only six successive photos whereas JPEG mode gets somewhere around 20). I also put the camera in "sunny" white balance mode since most of the tennis court was in full sunlight. Finally, I put the camera on my monopod to help support the weight of my 70-200mm f2.8L lens.

As I followed Emma around with the lens, I kept the zoom a little wide so I wouldn't have any problem keeping her in the lens. I shot horizontally because I feel that works very well for tennis, especially when a player is swinging at the ball (like Emma is).

Because the aperture is set to a wide f2.8, the background is slightly out of focus. Emma was close to the sideline when I got the shot, so that is why the fence isn't more out of focus.

In the final print (which is what you see), I cropped the photo in quite a bit to focus the attention on just Emma and the tennis action. The inside of her forearm was overexposed, so I tried to back off the brightness there. This is one area where shooting RAW would have helped. RAW contains more image data in the bright areas, which allows you to pull back from overblown hightlights when you use something like Adobe Camera Raw (which you can find with Photoshop and Photoshop Elements).

The 1/3200 shutter speed did a great job of freezing the ball on the strings of the racket. One thing I could have done differently is slow the shutter speed down. It can be tricky to do this, but there is a balance where you have a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the player, but slow enough where the ball is still a little bit of a blur. This effect does a great job of conveying the idea of motion in the photo.

The better the skills of the players (and the harder they hit the ball), the easier it is to find a slow enough shutter speed to do this. However, since Emma and her partner are just getting started, the game was very slow and it might have been impossible to achieve this effect.

Basic Photo Tip: Stopping Action and Motion Blur

In photography, you usually want to stop all of the action in a photo and remove any motion blur. But sometimes you don’t. Deciding on which is often determined by what your overall goal is in taking the photo.

Do you want to capture the moment of joy when a football player crosses the goal line? Then stopping the action is likely what you want. But what if you shooting a NASCAR race? Stopping all action, including the spinning wheels, will make it look like the cars are just sitting on the track. In that instance, you probably want a little motion blur to convey the feeling of how fast they are moving.

Let’s talk about stopping the action first. There are a couple of basic rules to remember. First, for normal photography (things like portraits, landscapes, and candid photos), take the length of your lens and put it under a one. In other words, if you are shooting with a 50mm normal lens, then you need to have 1/50 of a second to expect a sharp, clear photo.

Lens Length Shutter Speed 30mm 1/30 50mm 1/50 200mm 1/200 500mm 1/500

If you are trying to capture a subject in motion, however, you need a faster shutter speed. This is especially true for sports, as shown in this football photo.


The rule of thumb is the same, but you have to triple the length of your lens to expect a sharp, clear photo.

Lens Length Shutter Speed 30mm 1/90 50mm 1/150 200mm 1/600 500mm 1/1500

Let’s go back to the NASCAR example. How do you create the motion blur to help a car look like it is moving? By panning. Panning is the act of moving the camera in the direction the subject is moving while taking the photo.

Let’s say you’re at a race and the cars are going past you from the right to the left. In panning, you need to focus on the zone the car is about to go through and as the car drives through that zone you follow it with your camera, keeping it in the viewfinder the whole time. Panning also requires you to slow your shutter speed down a little bit from normal sports photography. As a rule of thumb, try the one over your lens’ length as a starting point and then adjust as necessary.

There is definitely a trick to panning, and it generally takes a lot of practice to get it down. Here is a good example of panning from a road race:



Do you see how the blurred background and blurred wheels on the car help make it seem like the car is going really fast? When you get it right, panning can be fantastic!