Photography Tips - Action Photography

Okay today we're looking at action shots and capturing action. Now capturing action is all about trying to capture shots of fast moving objects where there's a lot of activity going on but it's not all about using fast shutter speeds there are lots of different methods we can use to capture action. Now it's going to be quite a noisy event today as you can hear but what we're going to do we're here at this motocross meeting and you can get these motocross meetings all across the country usually in an area nearby so it's a great location to go and get these sort of shots but what we're going to do is we're going to look at using fast shutter speeds so that we can capture action and freeze the action but we're also going to look at panning shots where we're going to slow that shutter speed down and enable us to capture some blur and motion because one of the things with capturing action shots is that you don't always want to freeze the action perfectly because the shot can look a little stagnant. So we're going to demonstrate both techniques today. Now i'm working with two cameras one with a telephoto lens and one with the wide angle and i'm going to switch between cameras to get the shots as necessary and we're going to move around this track and find a few different positions to shoot. The bikes are just warming up at the moment and then there's some bigger bikes coming on later on so hopefully we're going to get some really good shots out of this sequence today. Okay so what we're going to do now is show you a little bit about the technique called panning. Now i've just done a couple of test shots on the junior race and they seem to work quite well on this bend here. Now this sort of position is a great position because i'm going to be close to the action here as the bikes are coming around the corner. Now basically the technique of panning means that i'm going to use a slow shutter speed and in this instance i'm going to use a shutter speed of about 30th of a second and i'm going to follow the action with the camera. So basically the shutter is remaining open while you're following the bike and the action with the camera and the background then blurs and then because you're synchronized with the bike you get a fairly static image on the bike and it gives a great sense of speed to your image. Now the race is just starting off now hopefully we're going to get a few bunched off on this corner that that panning technique will work now. So i'm just going to get rid of this camera with the telephoto lens a second, use the wide angle camera at 30th of a second and see what we can get. Okay so you can see what i was doing there i was following the action with the camera and with that slow shutter speed and synchronizing my camera with the action hopefully we'll keep the subject sharp and then get a sense of speed in the background. Okay what i'm doing now is i've seen that the panning technique's working really well so i'm going down low now. It's all about capturing that sense of speed. Stills photography is a frozen image and you've got to try and capture that sense of action. Okay we're working we're working with shutter speeds of about 30th or 40th of a second and it's just about right for the level of speed we got here. But sometimes you have to test different shutter speeds and see what works best because you don't want it too slow that the action becomes blurred. But you've obviously got to have it slow enough that with your panning motion the background does leave a streak to emphasize that speed. But at the moment i'm finding 30th or 40th of a second is good. Here come some more bikes. And at that speed the aperture is quite small because a lot of light is coming through. And what i do in this case rather than work in manual mode is switch to shutter priority because that way you can just select the shutter speed and let the camera sort out the aperture. Now what you do need to be careful of when you're working in shutter priority mode is that the camera's light meter is accurate. You've got an exposure compensation button on your camera and if you find your exposures are a little bit too dark or a little bit too light then you can switch the exposure compensation to compensate for that slight imbalance in the light meter. So do a few test shots first, check the exposure balance. If it's underexposed then adjust the exposure compensation to get it to the correct exposure. And then you can forget about it. You can stick in shutter priority mode and adjust the shutter speeds between the 20th, 30th, 40th, 50th and test your different panning shots. Great stuff, great stuff. It's all good.