Most of the time when I am shooting sports I break out the heavy artillery. A 300mm lens is my weapon of choice allowing me to crop tight in the camera, blur the background and get a nice look at the action. But every now and then it doesn’t hurt to widen your perspective with a different lens. Shooting a football camp at West High I switched to a 16-35mm lens for a different perspective.
It takes a little more thought when shooting sports with a wide angle lens. To fill the frame you have to get closer which means you are in the danger zone of action. You have to plan where it is safe to shoot from so you don’t get clobbered by the action.
Backgrounds come into play much more with the wide angle lens. An extremely low angle looking up can isolate your subject against the sky while looking down from up high can have the ground provide a uniform background.
Depth of field is also increased which can lead to some interesting compositions with converging and receding lines giving a flow or movement to the picture.
It doesn’t work for every picture but it is worth a try every now then to broaden your coverage and point of view behind the camera during the sports shoot.
1 comment:
Glenn:
While these are top-notch photos. One has to give you a gold star on the "First Shovel Of Dirt" photo in Saturday's Press. Those can be truly boring and taken mostly as something for the City Council to clip for their scrapbooks. You were able to be creative even with that. Nice touch.
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