Sports Photography How To

Bill Pekala, head of Nikon Professional Services, came to the US Open at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, New York, last August to run the NPS operation at the matches. Sports events can be the ultimate proving ground for camera gear, and one of NPS’s primary roles is providing their member professional photographers with the assurance of dedicated on-site support.

Today’s camera gear is faster than ever and much of it is tailor-made for capturing any sort of motion or movement. So then why do so many photographers struggle to shoot compelling images of action? Part of it has to do with timing and part of it has to do with composition. Your camera and lens can only do so much and there’s more to a great action shot than simply capturing the moment and making sure it’s in focus. For this assignment, we were looking for images of anything from basketball to dance to wildlife, just as long as there was some kind of action in the scene. For the winning images, we were looking for great composition, effective use of backgrounds and scenery, and powerful emotion: human, animal, or otherwise. Here are our six favorites.

Have you ever wanted to master slow shutter speed panning for more interesting nature, wildlife, and sports/action photography? If so, we’ve got you covered with the tutorial below.

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.

Capturing Sports Action

If you love shooting sports—whether it's a children's Little League or professional Major League game—timing is everything. Grabbing the shot at just the right moment takes a lot of practice, patience, and film (or a large-capacity memory card). You can do...

Whether you shoot landscapes, wildlife, sports, or just about any other type of photos, if you miss focus you’ve pretty much botched the job. That’s because unsharp results are one of the most common ways to spoil an otherwise great scene.