The Two Keys to Great Action Shots

Yes, action photography requires a little technical knowledge. You'll need to understand how to select the shutter speed that will freeze action when you want to, or choose a longer shutter speed to allow for some creative blurring effects when you want to do that. But neither of those skills are the real keys to getting great action pictures.

The two most important things you must master are

• Choosing the right subject. Know who to photograph, why they are important, what they might do that's photo worthy, and where to stand to capture them. (As photojournalism immortal Robert Capa once said, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough.")
• Choosing the right moment. Snap a photo a fraction of a second too late (and that's easy to do with a slow-responding digital camera) or too early, and you may capture the immortal instants that happen just after or just before the decisive moment. There were lots of photographs of the Hindenberg as it started its descent in Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937, and quite a few of the charred rubble on the ground afterwards, but none of them made the cover of a Led Zeppelin album.
  
  

In short, the two most important things about capturing an exciting action photograph are knowing what to photograph, and when. If you stop to think about it, action is a continuous series of moments, each a little different from the last, all leading up to the moment. It's the instant when a shooting guard releases the basketball at the apex of a jump shot, and you know that it's going to sail over the arms of a defender and swish through the net of the basket. Or, the moment might come from the look on a goalie's face as a soccer ball sails past her outstretched hands into the goal. It might be the instant when the bat connects with a baseball for the winning run, as shown in Figure 5.1. The moment might involve almost no motion at all, as when a field goal kicker lowers his head in shame when he sees his boot is tumbling wide of the goalposts. Capturing the right moment is important.

Figure 5.1. A decisive moment can be the instant the bat strikes the ball to send a game-winning home run over the fence.

However, the heart of sports photography lies in capturing not only the right moment, but the right subject, in the right circumstances. My first lesson as a fledging professional came when the newspaper's picture editor rejected the shot I'd tentatively circled on my contact sheet. The shot was a thrilling moment, frozen in time.

"It's a great action picture," Danny, the photo editor, admitted, "but you've captured one of the scrubs making a meaningless play after the game was already in the bag. His parents would love this picture, but the fans would wonder why we published it. Even a so-so shot of a key player at the turning point in the third quarter would have been better." Choosing the right subject goes hand-in-hand with choosing the right moment.

The Decisive Moment is more than the title of a 1952 book by the father of photojournalism, Henri Cartier-Bresson, an enduring master of exquisite timing who passed away in 2004. The crucial instant can be seen in Robert Capa's chilling 1936 photograph of a Spanish Loyalist militiaman at the moment of his death, or the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a woman leaping to her death to escape a hotel fire in Atlanta in 1946. (If you want to talk about timing, the famous picture was taken by a Georgia Tech student, using his last flashbulb.)

If you keep the moment and the subject in mind at all time, you're on your way to great action photos.