where there’s smoke there’s fire

Hello there. This is Ryu Voelkel and Matt Cohen and we are sports photographers based in Berlin, Germany and Oakland, California respectively. We won’t get into who lives in a better city, but we have been given an opportunity by NR to do a post on sports photography.

On our sports photography website/podcast called Big Lens Fast Shutter, we educate our listeners on how to become better sports photographers.  No trade secrets are safe with us as we dole them out to our listeners like food samples at super markets. Yes, we are here to demystify the world of sports photography.

We have taken the liberty and chosen 3 topics in sports photography. Both of us chose a photo to best describe each of the topics and what gear we used to shoot it with. Voila, let’s get on with it.

Panning 

Ryu: As you may already know, panning is a popular technique where one uses a very slow shutter speed (slower than the speed needed to freeze the action) to track a moving object within the frame.  Popular application will be in car racing where the car is in focus and the background is blurred out.  Here I used a Nikon D4, 400mm f2.8, and a 1.4x teleconverter in shooting an ice dancing pair at a figure skating competition called Eric Bompard in Paris, France.  I used 1 full second as a shutter speed as I really wanted to see how far I could stretch this panning shot in terms of the area of focus.  I shot about 1.5 hours of ice dancing and I only got handful of the shots that were useful and this was my favourite one.  This was also shot during their practice session and not during the competition.  More often than not, you will have better access during trainings and warm-ups than during the competition.

Matt: One of the most exciting parts of college football games is when the teams emerge from the tunnel and take the field.  It’s also a great time to try different looks because it happens once per game, every game, and you know exactly where it’s going to be.  I took advantage of the fact that it was a night game, Put the 14-24mm f2.8 on the D3S and dropped the shutter down to 1/15 to get enough blur.  I ducked behind a trash can to avoid getting trampled and waited for the team to run by me.  This was the only frame out of the 7 I shot where a player’s face is perfectly frozen.  Side note: The player with the wrist band in front of the frozen player is…Andrew Luck.  So yeah, this really is a game of inches.

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