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Taking Action Photos

This morning I was chatting with a young pharmaceutical student. I asked him if he had any pictures he was particularly fond of and immediately had several file transfers on my desktop. He’s obviously passionate about his photo lifestyle, even though he uses only a small pocket camera.

This one caught my attention. The focus is just the opposite to the action photos you normally find in the sports section of the Sunday paper. Usually we see the athlete in sharp relief, with the background blurred to show you how fast he was moving, but if you think about it, you’ll realize that in real life, it’s actually the athlete and the ball that are doing the moving.
It may not win any prizes as a “good” picture, since the subject is blurred but I think it protrays the intensity and speed of the moment better than a “correct” photo would have.

Here’s what he had to say about the photo:

I’m not a professional photographer, so I don’t think about how to make my photos look good. I think about what’s fun and interesting to me, and what will make my friends laugh, or start chattering about their memories when they see the pictures. I don’t consider angles or balance, I simply say to myself, “Hey, if I take a photo of this, my friends and I will get excited all over again when we see it!”

I don’t like to use a flash, indoors or out. It changes the feeling of the moment. If the lighting has orange tones and is soft and dim and I use a flash, everyone’s faces turn out much whiter than they really are, and the surroundings, and good food people are eating simply disappear. So I just raise the EV value and turn off the flash.

I use the continuous mode on my camera a lot. That’s how I took this shot. I had it set to the highest speed, and must have had 50 pictures of this one kick to choose from.

Thanks to Masayoshi Tokunaga for the photo and advice. I wonder if the ball went in?

Tags: action photos, Soccer, sports photography

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