Shooting Soccer

geoles2geoles2 Registered Users Posts: 27 Big grins
edited September 12, 2011 in Sports
hi everybody, I am shooting my daughters soccer game this weekend and looking for more tips. I shot it last year, but this year I have a better lens and sometimes get confused about dof, so here is my question.

I have a 70-200 2.8 Tamron lens, so it seems that I should shoot at 2.8 the whole time thusly isolating the player, but I have the bad habit of zooming in to 100% in LR3 and when the action is further away its not as sharp? Is this normal, should I be shooting at like f8? And if so why is the 2.8 the lens to get so to speak?

Thanks for all your help, George

Comments

  • johngjohng Registered Users Posts: 1,658 Major grins
    edited September 9, 2011
    George,
    There are a few issues at play. First, if you're looking at 100% you're going to be unhappy with a LOT of sports images until you perfect your craft AND use pro grade lenses and cameras. Even then, 100% rarely looks good compared to 100% crops of static subjects.

    Second: you mention shots at distance. The biggest mistake most newbie sports shooters make is trying to take shots of action too far away. I've found the usable range of a 200mm lens is about 25 yards. For U6 that can cover a lot of ground. For full field, that's terribly short. As a general rule I suggest you should have your subject filling at least 2/3 of the vertical frame IN CAMERA. If they're smaller than that in the frame they're too far away and you'll have less accurate focus and thus less sharp photos. So, don't think you can take photos from 50 yards away, crop them and get consistently good results.

    Third: The tamron is a sharp lens but by most accounts it's slow to focus. Not a problem when taking portraits, but it is a problem when you're using continuous focus to track moving subjects. So you may find that the tamron doesn't do a stellar job of keeping good focus when a subject moves through the focal plane toward/away from you. So, shooting at f/2.8 you may have less keepers with that lens than you would with a sigma HSM lens say. So, given the slower focus capabilities, shooting at f4 might get you more keepers if the lens can't keep up with the action.
  • time2smiletime2smile Registered Users Posts: 835 Major grins
    edited September 9, 2011
    George, exactly what John said

    I have the Tammy 2.8 and i would do F5.6 to F8 most of the time. Use the F2.8 when light is not sufficient for fast shutter speeds or for those nice bokeh shots. To achieve nice bokeh with the tammy the players need to be closer to you than they are to the background, the greater the ratio the nicer the bokeh,

    As John said fill the frame with the players and you will have many more keepers.
    Ted....
    It's not what you look at that matters: Its what you see!
    Nikon
    http://www.time2smile.smugmug.com
  • jheftijhefti Registered Users Posts: 734 Major grins
    edited September 10, 2011
    If your daughter is playing on a full size field, I would suggest hanging out near the goal to catch the action there. You'll get some good tight shots with the 70-200mm. Also, don't forget to shoot from the player's level, which means sitting on a stool for teenagers and sitting on the ground for little kids. This may seem like a small matter, but it really affects the feeling of the shots.

    Otherwise, you have gotten some good advice from others here.

    Good luck!
    http://johnhefti.com/
  • geoles2geoles2 Registered Users Posts: 27 Big grins
    edited September 12, 2011
    Thanks everyone for the tips, I will post some as soon as I can. THis is my first time using the 70-200 tamron for my daughters soccer and I was having a lot of trouble, seemed real slow. I shot a Chicago Fire game and dont remember it bieng this slow, i shot that back in June, but sat and sun I was just having all kinds of focus problems.
  • jheftijhefti Registered Users Posts: 734 Major grins
    edited September 12, 2011
    geoles2 wrote: »
    Thanks everyone for the tips, I will post some as soon as I can. THis is my first time using the 70-200 tamron for my daughters soccer and I was having a lot of trouble, seemed real slow. I shot a Chicago Fire game and dont remember it bieng this slow, i shot that back in June, but sat and sun I was just having all kinds of focus problems.

    Funny coincidence, but I just shot a Chicago Fire game this past Saturday: http://johnhefti.zenfolio.com/p525268280

    They were playing our local San Jose Earthquakes, who finally broke their long losing streak!

    Regarding the focus problems, did you change any of the settings on the camera? Servo v One shot maybe? Or tracking priority? I shot my daughter's U15 game yesterday, and had one of my cameras accidentally set to save sRAW/sJPG, so a number of good shots won't go beyond postcard size prints :-(
    http://johnhefti.com/
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