The thrill of freezing a split-second moment of fast-moving action is one of the great joys of photography but it’s important to always be aware that if you fail to prepare, you must be prepared to fail. It’s a cliché but, as with many genres of photography, capturing action requires you to prepare well to give yourself the best chance of getting great shots. If you’re looking to freeze fast-moving motorsport or a bird soaring in the sky, you’ll need to set up your camera and equipment to help to ensure you can shoot what you want. There’s nothing worse than turning up to a sports event, airshow or game drive without being prepared. The benefit of setting everything up in-camera before you venture out, is that you can relax and concentrate on what’s unfolding in front of your camera and lens.
The variables are pretty standard – focusing/AF choices, control over shutter speeds, the ability to choose high ISO settings, ensuring you get stable images, making decisions on customising your camera, deciding on custom buttons, lens choices, whether to deploy burst modes and making other creative choices (such as whether to capture creative blur).
Without going into a deep dive about which are the best cameras for shooting action, do bear some basic ‘must haves’ in mind. It’s best to use a camera that offers a wide range of AF modes, customisation options that include button assignments, menu settings for action, good frame rate options (ideally, at least 10fps if not more), control over shutter speeds and dual memory card slots to handle rapid-fire shooting bursts.
You’ll also need either a telephoto lens or a telephoto zoom as most action tends to happen some distance away from you and your camera. As a general rule, for each 10 metres you are away from your subject you’ll need 100mm of lens focal length. So, if you are around 30 metres away you’ll need the equivalent of 300mm in 35mm format and so on...
Focusing choices
In many cases when you’re dealing with a fast-moving object a great focusing choice is continuous autofocus (C-AF), which is sometimes known as AI Servo/Focus. In continuous mode cameras will continue to hunt for focus when the shutter button is half-depressed. Alternatively, you can choose to set your camera to auto AF mode, which will switch between single AF (S-AF) and C-AF if it detects a moving subject. But, basically, C-AF is probably the most effective option to select when you’re set to track and shoot moving subjects.
Beyond choosing C-AF you’ll need to decide which autofocus areas to deploy. A solid choice is Dynamic-Area AF mode, which allows you to choose a focus point within the frame where you expect your subject to be. If the camera’s AF system detects any movement it will automatically switch to the neighbouring autofocus points in order to keep up with the
