Shooting Sports with 50D

The 50D is an excellent sports photography camera. It excels at high FPS, fast shutter speeds, amazingly accurate focus accuracy and speed, and large burst capacities.

Taking photos of your kids or favorite team playing sports is strong factor in why many people purchase digital SLR cameras.

50D and 70-200 2.8

Its difficult to start taking sports photos without a basic understanding of what you are doing, or the features of your camera.

When you first start shooting sports, you need to grasp key concepts that will enable you to unlock the potential of your camera.

rear of 50D with 70-200 2.8

To shoot sports you need to stop action which is achieved by using a fast shutter speed to capture the action. When you use a shutter speed of 1/500, 1/1000, 1/2000 or higher you will extract maximum detail while minimizing movement blur both from camera movement and your subject moving. This is a key aspect to sports photography – the shutter speed. Its so important I will emphasize in bold fast shutter speeds stop action, and 1/500 is the starting point for fast shutter speeds.

So in order to shoot sports you will need a… yep fast shutter speed.
How do you get a fast shutter speed?
You use Aperture Priority “Av” mode or “Manual” mode on your camera.

In aperture priority you select the WIDEST aperture available to you, and change the ISO so that when you are metering your shots by pressing the shutter release button down half way, the camera is showing you it has selected a shutter speed of 1/500th of a second or faster. Its important to achieve proper exposures when shooting sports, if they are too under exposed your images will be noisy. If they are over exposed, you will lose the details of things such as the sky, white jerseys, etc…

We have broken the sports shooting guide down into multiple lessons based on the type of situation you are attempting to shoot.

*****Before we send you to your specific lesson, please take note of this very important setting on your camera. *******
To shoot sports with your 50D you will need to ensure that the High ISO noise reduction custom II – 2 is either disabled or on Low or Standard. The High ISO reduction option feature uses the cameras buffer heavily, and reduces the number of shots you can take continuously (jpg or raw). Failure to disable this feature will result in dramatic loss of frame rate, and most likely lose critical shots while frustrating the user.

Also, while we prefer to shoot in RAW, you will need larger memory cards or more of them… You will get about 200 RAW shots on a 4gb Compact Flash card. Plan accordingly, but try to shoot RAW so you can adjust white balance later on.