As the football season quickly approaches its end, I find myself reflecting on the incredible season it’s been this year. As a sports photographer, I have had the privilege of capturing some truly unforgettable moments on the pitch, watching my team (The Eagle FC) chase for points right up until the last game.
As the summer feels like it’s drawing to a close, for anyone shooting winter sports it’s the time to dust off the hand warmers and other bits and bobs and get ready. There’s a few things I might try out this year, as I try to continue improving both my photo and video skills while out pitchside…
Following on from my previous post about starting out in sports photography, I thought I’d put something together about what I’ve learnt around shooting football matches. When I first started planning out a post on this, I wasn’t going to make it a tutorial (I’m still learning, so no master!) but as I’m writing this it’s apparent it is. So, this will be my take on how I shoot football games, and please comment/message me if you have any other tips or think I could do something better. One of my original aims for this post was that I could provide a sort of reference set, locations and focal lengths with example images to try to help people know what to expect depending on their lens availability and or location flexibility. Note – I’ve also included a video part to this tutorial so you can see what it looks like from where I’m sitting during the game (link to video). In the future I’d like to expand this to some other sports, so let me know if you have found this useful and I will try to make that happen, but for now I’ll start with football.
One of the first genres of photography I really spent much time on was sports photography (alongside wildlife), but then after a while it dropped off as I moved away from the area of the team I was shooting. However more recently I’ve got the sports photography buzz back again, so I thought it would be a good time to share some experience of how I’ve gotten the buzz back, and how others may find that trying sports photography is easier than they thought (and definitely something to try at least a few times).
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