THE SOLUTION
The key to sharp action shots is shutter speed. If I came to your house and chatted with you for a whopping 1/100 sec., you would no doubt say, “Well, he was here, but he was gone in the blink of an eye!” And why not, since 1/100 sec. is pretty darn quick? Just how fast is 1/100 sec.? Believe it or not, it is ten times faster than the blink of an eye, which averages around 1/10 sec. So you’d think that 1/100 sec. would be plenty fast enough to freeze action, but you’d be wrong.
On the other side of the coin, there is a widely held belief that extremely fast speeds—1/2000 to 1/4000 sec.—are needed to capture outdoor sports, but that is not true either. During the late 1960s and most of the 1970s, SLR cameras had a maximum shutter speed of 1/1000 sec. Yet rarely did anyone hear a Sports Illustrated photographer complain that he missed a shot because 1/1000 sec. wasn’t fast enough.
Most outdoor sports action shots can easily be recorded at shutter speeds of 1/250 to 1/1000 sec. And for many experienced shooters, the key to getting good exposures at 1/250 or 1/1000 sec. is the direct result of using the right ISO. High ISOs make it easier to employ action-freezing shutter speeds. Also, with the higher ISOs you can use smaller lens openings for a greater depth of field. The greater your depth of field, the larger your area of sharp focus and the easier it is to maintain tack-sharp focus on your subjects as they move around. However, with today’s advanced autofocus features, keeping them in focus is rarely the problem. That extra depth of field might not be necessary, so shutter speed remains the primary exposure concern.
Another consideration is distance. Here’s an easy way to tell if you’re close enough: Is your frame at least 75% filled with the subject? If not, get closer.
The next consideration is the direction of the action. Is it coming toward you? Is it moving side to side? Or is it traveling up or down? When action is coming toward you or moving away from you, you can get away with a shutter speed of 1/250 sec. When the action is moving side to side, your shutter speed should be faster, between 1/500 and 1/1000 sec.
While shutter speed is the crucial element for a good stop-action exposure, whether or not you capture the desired action has more to do with timing than shutter speed. As such, your most useful tool is a motor drive. Some cameras come with built-in motor drives (also known as Burst mode or Continuous Shooting mode), which automatically fire a rapid succession of exposures as long as you depress the shutter release button. This gives you a better chance of capturing that peak moment. You can begin firing the shutter several seconds ahead of the peak action and continue until a second or two after the action has stopped. It’s a safe bet that one, if not several, exposures will be successful. Without a motor drive, it can be hit or miss as you try to anticipate the exact moment to shoot.
While at the dive shop across from our hotel on Maui, Hawaii, I overheard a couple of “dudes” talking about “some big swells coming in on the North Shore tomorrow.” I asked if that meant the surfers would be out, and they both enthusiastically responded, “Oh yeah!”
Arising early the next morning, I found the perfect shooting location. Within 30 minutes, several surfers had arrived along with 20- to 30-foot waves. Soon, more than 20 surfers had accepted the challenge offered up by these thunderous and sometimes unforgiving waves. There was a fluid poetry to their moves, a rhythm that seldom struck the wrong chord.
With my camera and 200–400mm Nikkor zoom lens mounted on a monopod, and my ISO set to 100, I set my shutter speed to 1/1000 sec. Pointing my camera up at the blue sky, I adjusted the aperture until f/5.6 indicated a correct exposure. A clear blue sky is a great place to take a meter reading when shooting high- contrast, frontlit scenes like this, with so much white in the waves. White is a killer when it comes to exposure, as it reads far too bright for most light meters to measure properly, resulting in an exposure that looks more gray than white. To avoid this, I take a reading from the blue sky, about 30 degrees above the horizon, since it’s neutral insofar as not being too dark or too light. (For more about this, see How to Expose High-Contrast Scenes.)
With the surfers moving at such a frantic pace, I switched my autofocus mode to AF-Servo mode, which meant that my Nikon camera would continuously keep my subjects in focus as I tracked them inside my viewfinder, and fired in Burst mode at roughly six frames per second. Although I was shooting for less than an hour, I managed to record a number of exciting images, with most of the credit going to the surfers for providing such spectacular action.
A shutter speed of 1/1000 sec. froze these surfers in
action.
200–400mm lens, f/15 for 1/1000
sec.
Although it took some negotiating (translation: ice cream), my daughter Chloë indulged my request to throw her head back several times so that I could photographically freeze the action of her long, wet hair flipping backward with water flying off.
Because I wanted an action-stopping shutter speed of 1/800 sec. and a medium depth-of-field aperture of f/11, I had to raise my ISO to 400. Telling her to stay in the same spot and not move her feet when she came up from underwater allowed me to prefocus as well as precompose the shot. (The medium depth of field increased the area of sharpness, covering me if she moved a few inches closer to or away from my point of prefocus.) On the count of three, I was ready, and this is the result: an action-stopping, sharply focused image of a day at the pool.
A higher ISO helped me freeze this
motion.
80–200mm lens, f/11 for 1/800
sec.
I saw them from a distance, a group of kids jumping off a large wooden box near downtown Doha, Qatar. After being informed that jumping off boxes was a new art form, I crouched down near the base of the box and looked up through my wide-angle lens at the jumpers. Because of my close proximity to the action and the erratic movements of the jumpers, I needed a shutter speed of at least 1/1000 sec. (Shutter speeds of 1/500 sec. or slower would have recorded some degree of blurring owing to the high rate of speed with which they were launching off the box and my close proximity to their antics.) With my camera set to 1/1000 sec. in Shutter Priority, I framed the frontlit box and blue sky overhead. Over the course of the next 15 minutes, half a dozen courageous young men leaped and spun and flipped and turned their bodies into a number of surprising contortions.
My close proximity to this subject required a very fast
shutter speed.
16–35mm lens, f/8 for 1/1000
sec.