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Sports photography - part 5 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

by Mike McNamee Published 01/08/2011

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Bodies

Choice of camera body will primarily be determined by the existing equipment that you own, it is quite rare for a photographer to launch themselves directly into sports photography from a standing start.

The modern camera body has transformed sports photography. Sensitivity is way beyond anything that could be imagined 20 years ago. At that time 5fps was considered fast (the camera had to drag film across from one side to the other, how quaint!) and emulsions were limited to 1000 ISO for colour and 3200 ISO for monochrome, both with dreadful penalties in grain.

Today 1600 ISO is quite a comfortable sensitivity which can easily go for both newspaper and magazine reproduction and 6400 ISO is highly usable. You can do stuff that was previously impossible. Also today image stabilisation and better focus tracking have raised the standard of both what is possible and what is expected. Do not forget though that image stabilisation damps down movement at your end but has no influence on the subject - it they are moving they will still blur the result.


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The next body choice is between full-frame and small chip. Pixel pitch is important for low noise performance and so a full-size chip of modest pixel count is a favoured option for sport when low light performance is more important than operation speed. We say this despite the notion that a small chip delivers a higher 'effective focal length' - this is a myth, you can always crop down a larger image. Nikon have adopted one policy (the Ds and D3s are big chips), Canon offer the full chip EOS 1Ds Mk III (with 'compromised' sports performance) or the blisteringly quick EOS 1D Mk IV which has a small chip.

A noticeable thing about putting this feature together is the number of times we have struggled for resolution, cropped images, had to deal with unforgiving JPEGs, had to think about sharpening and been offered noise-reduced images - there is obviously a big difference between supplying newspapers and glossy magazines such as Professional Imagemaker!

The larger pro bodies are also favoured in spite of the additional cost. Higher framing rates, better weather sealing, more robust construction and vertical format shooting are all important features.

The larger batteries also allow the photographer to keep shooting for longer. The cost and features for remote release may also be important and need to be checked out as part of the decision making. Occasional use of video may also be important today.


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1st Published 01/08/2011
last update 18/07/2022 16:35:44

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