Most digital cameras have a “Sports” of “Action” mode that help you to clearly capture the fast moving action of sporting events.  However, since digital photography of sports involves timing – capturing the exact moment when the action occurs – the user has a much larger role to play here than in other types of photography and here are a few tips to help you get the most from your sports photos.

If you are taking picutres of a game being played on a large field, you have two ways of going about it.Your first option is to follow the action as it moves around the field with your camera ready to take the photo the moment the action you want to capture occurs – this is the perfect way of taking picture of sports where the action can occur anywhere, like hockey and football.  The other way is better for games where you can predict where the action will occur – the home plate in a baseball game or the basket in a basketball game – and can keep the camera pointed in that direction so you can click when the action moves into the frame.

No matter how fast your trigger finger is on the shutter button, there will always be a time lag between the button being pressed and the picture being taken as the camera will need to set itself to take the picture.This time lag is usually in fractions of a second but in fast moving sports, the delay could cause you to miss the crucial play you want to record.  The solution to this is the keep the shutter button half pressed – this keeps the camera continually resetting itself and reduces even the split second time lag.Another option is to use the “Burst” (or equivalent) mode where the camera will take continuous photos as long as the button remains pressed down.  This will allow you to get a large number of pictures in just a few seconds – you can subsequently select only the ones you want and delete the rest.

Another cause of camera delays in the digital photography of sports is that until the previous photos has been written to the memory card, the next one cannot be taken – a memory card with a slow write time will delay the taking of your next picture.  The faster the write speed of the memory card, the less will be the time before the next picture can be taken.