Photo by: Viele Geischter.

This photo of some football (soccer) players posing together came out of the recent uploads section of Flickr. It’s a great illustration of how to take a quick posed shot outside in the afternoon: find some shade! Look in the background (or in the other pictures in the photostream) and you’ll notice it’s a very bright, sunny day. Put the three lads out in the sun, and they’ll be squinting and have some harsh shadows all over. Instead, they’re sitting in the shade and they’ve got some nice, soft light all around them. One problem with this is your background (if it’s in the sun) will usually get blown out, so don’t expect to get a lot of definition out of it. It can also help to throw in a little bit of fill light from a flash, but you don’t want to over do it.

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 vramak.

I wanted to look through some sports pictures today. Although this isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I started flicking through Flickr, it is too cool. Like a lot of people commented, the timing here is perfect. I like the color. Only thing that seems a bit odd is the pose. If the player is jumping like that, I’d assume he’s trying to do some kind of bicycle kick – which means that his foot should be coming up under the ball. Instead it looks like he’s kind of drop kicking the ball kung fu style…