A few weeks ago, I picked up a Canon Digital Rebel XT on eBay. It was part of a lot, and I didn’t really need it… but it turned out that I was able to use it as an extra body at the 2011 William Paterson University Fashion Show.

All of the pictures in this post were taken backstage with the XT, documenting the prep work involved in the fashion show. Even though the XT  is only an 8 megapixel camera (about half the resolution of my t1i) and despite the fact that it was released 6 years ago, it performed quite nice.

The Set Up

The fashion show was a pretty busy night. We had a two-fold task: work out in the auditorium and cover the actual show and work back stage and cover the preparations. That pretty much necessitated two photographers and at least two camera bodies.

I stayed out in the auditorium working the show, and Olinda went backstage with the XT. She also had a Canon Speedlite 430EX II, which was pretty necessary for the poor lighting backstage. That let her work with a relatively low ISO (400), and a standard indoor exposure (f/5.6 and 1/30).

The result was that the pictures came out pretty good. She didn’t have to worry about using a high ISO setting, which I did out in the auditorium (I was shooting at ISO 3200 all night).

The pictures came out especially nice in the backstage hallways. Thanks to the low ceilings, the flash could be pointed straight up and bounced off the ceiling to light up the whole hallway. Out in the stage area, everything was covered with black curtains… and bouncing wasn’t so helpful.

Before doing this, I don’t know that I’ve  have been as satisfied with pictures taken on such an old camera. But, I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of images the XT produced and I’ll probably end up picking up an older camera body at some point to keep around as an extra. You never know when you’re going to need to be in two places at once or use two lenses at once.

Aside from the exposure settings (aperture, shutter speed, ISO), there are a number of other important things to think about when using your camera. A lot of the time, you may not need to worry about them. But, when I go out to take photos at a sporting event, there are a series of settings that I routinely think about changing.

Here’s a quick rundown, so you can think about them next time too…

Autofocus Mode. On my Canon t1i, I can choose between One Shot Focus, AI Servo, or AI Focus (a hybrid of the two). Whenever I get ready to shoot sports, I immediately flip the autofocus mode to AI Servo. This tells the camera to continuously focus on the focus point until I take a picture, and the camera will continually refocus if the subject moves.

Why is this important? Well, in sports… people move. You also need to anticipate the action to get those good shots. So I spend a lot of time watching the game through the viewfinder with my finger halfway down on the shutter release button. This gets the camera to pre-focus on the moving subject, and when it’s action time I press the button down the rest of the way.

Autofocus Point Selection. On my Canon t1i, there are 9 focusing points. If you don’t change anything, the camera automatically selects which point it thinks it should focus on. Sometimes this works out, sometimes this doesn’t. If I’m shooting a group of people standing still, this isn’t a big deal. I can let go of the shutter release button, and let the camera choose a new focus point.

If, on the other hand, I’m in the middle of a football game… I don’t have time for second chances. When there are a lot of bodies around, I want to choose where the camera focuses. As a result, I generally manually choose a point, and it’s usually the center point. This way, the camera will focus on whatever I’m pointing the camera at.

In some sports (like wrestling), you don’t have to worry about the extra bodies and the camera will be able to do a much better job of picking out what it should focus on. As a result I’ve experimented with using the automatic point selection, because that frees me up from pointing the center of the lens directly at my subject.

This is potentially one of the biggest problems with not adjusting your settings for sports, though. If your camera is constantly guessing at the wrong focus point, try manual selection and see if that helps.

Continuous Shot. Continuous shot mode was made for sports. It’s hard to guess precisely when the best moment of action will be, and using continuous mode you can take two or three frames and hope that one of them comes out great.

Be careful how long you hold the shutter down, though. On the one hand, its a great way to fill up your memory cards too quickly. However, it can also fill up the internal memory (the buffer) on your camera and cause it to shut down for a few seconds until it finishes writing all the image data.

I found this out the hard way during a 55-meter shuttle hurdle race. In the race, a team of four sprinters take turns racing down a 55 meter stretch of track. The result is that in a matter of 20 to 25 seconds, four guys have zoomed by my camera and I’m trying to take pictures of all of them. I accidentally clipped off too many shots during the first leg of the relay, and the camera was struggling to empty the buffer and keep up for the rest of the (very brief) race.

Finally, Exposure. To me, the three settings above constitute “sports mode.” It gets my camera all set up to focus on action and take continuous shots. Once that’s done, I can worry about nailing down an acceptable exposure (or letting the camera do it in aperture-priority mode).

I was looking through the Google Analytics data today, and I came across this question that someone had searched for: Is the Canon 85mm f/1.8 a good lens for night football photography?

I own a Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens. I love it, for certain things. Night football photography is not one of them. Keep reading…

Photo by: Henry.

I looked in the Recent Uploads section of Flickr, and this picture of a soldier moving with his rifle at the ready was number two or three on the page. It’s not a technically perfect shot, but there are a some cool elements here and I really like the gist of it. Notice how the background is really blurry, while the soldier is only slightly blurred? The soldier here is moving (probably not too quickly) and the photographer is moving the camera along with him. It’s a technique called panning, where you deliberately create some motion blur in the background to emphasize the movement and action in the shot. If a flash had been used, some of the ghosting would have been eliminated and the image would look a little crisper, but it’s a cool example of panning nonetheless.

Sometimes, motion blur is a good thing.

Photo by: dangorman16.

I didn’t have any inspiration as to what to look for today, so I headed to the recent uploads section of Flickr. There were some slim pickins, and it took me about a dozen reloads before I found this picture which kind of caught my eye. Composition is tough with sports pictures, since you’re often shooting something that’s happening in a split second and you’re confined by your lens and your position relative to the players. So, while this may not be the best composition for this image (I’d be curious to see what the field around the player looked like at the time), the image is still cool. It’s a good example of capturing the right moment at the right time. It looks like the player just landed a nice header going off to his left, and his body is still all contorted from the effort. Not a whole lot o’ time in which to capture that… good job.

Photo by: Brock McFadzean.

This is a cool action shot. Although I’ve worked a lot of sports, I haven’t had the opportunity to photograph much dance. I guess wrestling might the closest…  The thing to be grateful for here? Light! When you’re inside, you’re not always so lucky. It looks like the floor is lit on a couple sides by bright lights. There at least the one bright spotlight (in the background of the picture), and it looks like there’s another one behind the camera (creating the light shadow behind the dancer). An action shot needs a lot of light to be sharp, and in this case it looks like these spots do the trick. It’s also nice how the crowd around the dance floor is faintly visible, but not really lit. Bouncing a light off the ceiling to light the room might have lit them, as well as the dancer, killing the separation.

Photo by: richseow.

Found this pic in the recent uploads of Flickr. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but when I saw a little thumbnail of a sports pic I thought I’d check it out and see if it was any good. Turned out to be a decent shot of a rugby game in Singapore. There’s a quick enough shutter speed (1/1250th of a second) that there’s no motion blur at all. However, the image seems to be a little bit under-exposed. The turf is fine – nice and saturated – but the players are a little dark. This is exacerbated by the fact that they’re shadowed from the sun (note the faint shadow pointing emanating from #9′s foot). Mightta been a good candidate for an exposure compensation adjustment or just a little tweaking in Lightroom.

Photo by: jajjen.

Nice pic. The bird is in crisp focus. No blur (other than the bokeh background). One of the comments mentions some panning, but I’m not sure I see it. This was clearly shot in some pretty harsh sun, and there was likely a very quick shutter speed – freezing the bird in motion and eliminating any possibility for panning. Too bad the sun is just not quite in the perfect position, and the bird’s head is in a shadow…

Photo by Micah Camara.

Very cool picture. The quick shutter speed freezes the water in place. It’s nifty how the water splays out into a near perfect circle, too. Looks like a nice beach to hang out on, too. Nicer than the Jersey shore…