Equipment for Sports Photography

You’ll need more than just your skills and talents as a photographer. Your lenses and camera equipment are critical to becoming successful in sports photography. It’s unlikely you can achieve this using an mobile phone or point and shoot camera. This is especially true if you want to create noise free images shooting available-light at poorly lit high school gyms and football fields. Your best tool is a Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras with interchangeable lenses.

DSLR Cameras

DSLR cameras, especially the latest generations, have become VERY good for sports photography. It goes without saying, the latest models are the most expensive, but with the time between generations of new models mean great equipment can usually be found at very reasonable prices.

Lenses

Typically, inexpensive DSLR's usually come with a "kit" lens, a short-to-medium focal length zoom, such as an 18mm to 55mm zoom. The problem with these lenses are that they are typically slow in terms of focal ratio and they generally auto focus quite slowly. The Canon 18mm to 55mm that comes with many of their DSLR cameras is f/3.5 at its shortest focal length, but slows down to f/5.6 when zoomed. This may be adequate for good light, daytime use, but will be difficult to compensate inside, under dim, available-light sporting facilities. This Canon zoom lens is very inexpensive and its optical performance is going to be OK, but not spectacular when used wide open. Canon's top of the line, professional level lenses, such as the L series 16mm to 35mm f/2.8 zoom is, much better, but it costs 5 - 10 times as much! There are very good alternatives though. Canon’s 50mm f/1.8 is reasonably priced and performs well when stopped down one stop to f/2.5, letting you shoot at a one stop faster shutter speed, just might be enough to stop the action under available light, a slower zoom may not.

For night football at most high-school fields, you are just not going to be able to get around the fact that you will need a fast telephoto lens with a large maximum aperture that allows a lot of light. These can get quite expensive. Some fields are even so poorly lit that even a fast focal ratio of f/2.8 is not going to be enough to get you a high enough shutter speed to stop the action if your camera has high noise at a high ISO.

To solve this problem, you will need the more recent, and naturally most expensive, DSLR body which will exhibits exceptionally good high ISO noise characteristics. With these cameras you can shoot at ISO’s higher than 10,000 or even 12,000 when the light is really dim. At most poorly lit high school fields you can get a shutter speed of 1/500th of a second at f/2.8 at ISO 3200 or 6400. With technology available in today’s high end, professional camera bodies, 1/1200 of a second at f/2.8 at 12,000 ISO is not uncommon.

Don't worry too much about how many frames a second a camera can shoot, or how many megapixels it has. At the end of the day, peak action comes down to timing, reaction and knowledge of the game. I’d suggest most people won't see the difference between an 8 megapixel camera and a 10 megapixel camera, regardless of what that camera website told you.

Today’s newest cameras have the latest technology available, and that usually means the best noise performance and auto focus speed. For sports photography, this is one of the most important considerations in the images final quality.

Professional Equipment

If you’re thinking about becoming a professional sports photographer, there is no getting around the fact that you will need to invest a lot of money in equipment. Today, virtually everyone wants digital images, and the equipment required to produce mind blowing images on the front page is quite expensive.

You’re going to need professional level, digital cameras as well as long, fast, telephoto lenses. To shoot indoors or night games you’ll need fast lenses with large apertures that let in a lot of light. You won't be able to get by with just a 35-70 f/3.5 - 4.8 zoom lens. You'll need something like an 85mm f/1.8 lens for basketball, gymnastics, volleyball and other indoor sports and definitely a 300mm f/2.8 lens for large field sports like football, baseball, lacrosse and soccer. This is at an absolute minimum. My camera bag always contains a 70-200mm f/2.8 as well.

In addition to the all photographic skills and equipment required to be a professional sports photographer, considerable computer skills are also required to process, handle and deliver the digital images. You will need computers to process the digital images, usually including a very fast laptop to transmit those images from remote locations and sporting events.

Be ready to spend a lot of money on equipment, especially with new professional digital cameras coming out every 18 months.

Most professional sports photographers have, at a minimum, the following set of equipment:

• 2 - 3 Professional Level digital camera bodies ($5,000 - $6,000 each)
  Canon 1DX Mark III , Canon 1DX Mark II

• 3 - 5 Extra batteries ($150 each)

• Extreme wide angle 12mm -14mm f/2.8 ($1,900)

• Wide angle zoom lens 16mm - 35mm f/2.8 ($1,900)

• Fast, short telephoto 85mm f/1.4 ($1,800)

• Telephoto zoom 70-200 f/2.8 ($2,500)

• Fast Telephoto 300mm f/2.8 ($6,500)

• Fast Long Telephoto 400mm f/2.8 ($6,000 - $8,000)

• Teleconverter 1.4x ($600)

• Teleconverter 2x ($600)

• 2 Monopods ($190 each)

• Radio Remotes ($500)

• Fast Laptop with LOTS of Memory and storage ($5,500)

• Photoshop, Lightroom (or equivalent) ($650)

• Other software ($500)

• Rolling camera case ($400)

• Rain gear ($500)

  Total: $$$$ Tens Of Thousands of $$$$

Yep, Renting is an Option! Comes in handy for those ‘once in a while’ photoshoots.

Oh! and don’t forget to insure all of this for your new career. Your average Home Owners Policy from your friendly insurance company generally does’’t cover the ‘what if’s’ related to becoming a professional photographer.

Happy Shooting!

You Can Do This!