Sports Photography How To

David Bergman is a top sports photographer, and in this two-minute tutorial he demonstrates how to convey motion in action photos by “panning” with your camera. The technique involves moving the camera at the same speed as your subject, with the goal of keeping the subject sharp while creating a blurred effect in the background. 

One of the things I love about sports photography is that no matter which sport you’re shooting, the actual camera techniques themselves have an awful lot in common. For example, while baseball and tennis are very different sports, the skills you need and the settings you use for shooting both are just about the same. To help you capture better images of “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” here are my top 10 tips to help you no matter which sport you’re shooting.

Scott Serfas is one photographer who likes to get in on the action. In fact, he thrives on it. There is a certain amount of serendipity involved, but there is also a certain amount of passive control, in the sense that Serfas knows what to expect and expects the unexpected.

There are few things that can get a man’s heart pumping like a new camera and a legendary car race to test it out at. Or at least that’s how I felt when I got a chance to take the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G7 for a spin at the Indianapolis 500 in May.

Long lenses are exciting to use because they enable us to view and capture images with far greater magnification than what we can see with our eyes. They also deliver dramatic, compressed perspectives and enable photographers to isolate subjects from busy backgrounds.

That’s Carlos Correa, Houston Astros shortstop, in February, 2016, on a secluded beach on the south coast of Puerto Rico, training for the upcoming season. He’d been named American League Rookie of the Year for 2015, but no achievement was going to make this driven professional let up in his efforts to stay ahead of the game.

“I started in my father’s darkroom, retouching negatives at 5 years old,” recalls New York City-based photographer Paul Aresu. “My father was a wedding photographer, with 10 studios and maybe 50 photographers working under him.” In his late teens, Aresu was already shooting weddings for his dad. “It grew from there.” He achieved a BFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts and went on to assist Pete Turner and Tom Arma for several years. “I learned a lot about the business from them.”