5 Tips for Shooting Fast Action Indoor Sports

[Updated 9/22/2011]

Shooting indoor sports is one of the most challenging situations for photographers due to low light and fast action. I’ve been evolving my skills over the past several years while taking pictures for a local wrestling club that I help coach. Wrestling is especially very difficult to shoot because it is extremely fast paced, very low light and tough to predict.

Here are my top 5 tips for shooting fast action indoor sports tips:

• Make sure you understand the rules and basic concepts of the sport! I can’t count how many professional photographers, family members or other amateur photographers that  I’ve watched come strolling into local wrestling tournaments who don’t have a clue what they are shooting thus resulting in many missed shots which is why I feel its a good practice to learn the sport before photographing any amateur or professional sport.
• Use FAST glass! This is by far the most important. I see lots of parents and coaches all of the time trying to take photographs with their new DSLR kit camera and suddenly finding themselves frustrated and puzzled why all the images are dark or blurry. The typical root cause is the kit lens in most cases is not fast due to its minimal f-stop capability of which I learned the hard way like many others. If you are not familiar with the term “f-stop”, check out this great Wikipedia article. I’m a Canon shooter and my favorite indoor sports fast lens without breaking the bank is the Canon 50mm f1.4 lens and when I need a little more reach – I prefer the more expensive and very versatile Canon 70-200mm 2.8 lens. Those lenses work great because they have low “f-stop” numbers thus they let in a ton of light which will increase your shutter speed capabilities while shooting indoors. The Canon 50mm 1.8 is another very low cost lens (<$99) that will produce great results. There is an extra bonus when using these fast lenses – they have great Depth of Field aka DoF i.e. they’ll blur out the background while keeping your subject (athletes) in focus which results in much more dramatic and entertaining images while eliminating distracting background elements.
• Don’t use Flash! It is typically prohibited and allowed or not, it is very distracting to the athletes. If you are not shooting within 15ft of the action, pop up flash is not effective thus the only thing it will do is distract the athletes, coaches and fans. If you have find yourself in a situation where your current equipment cannot accommodate the low lighting and flash is allowed (always make sure to check with officials before assuming it is allowed!), setup flash to act as fill-flash which produces a much more realistic result and a little less distracting. To do this, set your camera in ‘manual mode’ and adjust the exposure like you are not using a flash. Then turn on your flash (external flash is highly recommended) and manually lower the flash power to -2/3 to -1 2/3 depending on the situation. Take a couple test shots and check your histogram to make sure the highlights are close but not pushed against the right side of the display. If the histogram is left or right, adjust the flash exposure up or down. That said, I still recommend to try not using flash. It’ll result in much better images and the athletes and coaches will greatly appreciate it `,-)
• Use a fast shutter speed i.e. 1/500 or greater to freeze the action. Due to the low light indoor conditions, this will require a very fast lens as mentioned above. I prefer to shoot in Manual mode and lock in the Shutter speed to (1/500th) and adjust the Aperture. I prefer to go one stop over “wide open” aka on the Canon 50mm 1.4 lens “wide open” is when setting the aperture to f1.4 thus one stop over “wide open” would be f2.0. The extra stop will usually result in a slightly sharper image vs “wide open”. If the light is really bad, I will shoot “wide open” as I want to keep my shutter speed at or above 1/500th rather then risking a blurry action from a slower shutter speed. My last resort is to kick up the ISO until I’m getting the shutter speed I need to freeze the indoor action. I know there will be added noise in the image from the high ISO setting but I can typically deal with that in post processing.
• When shooting sporting events, I’m taking hundreds of shots which can eat up memory quickly when in RAW thus I prefer to switch to JPEG format. This has one major downfall – not having same flexibility as RAW to adjust color and white balance during post processing. To workaround this caveat, make sure to bring a grey card and set your custom white balance before shooting. I found an inexpensive grey card on Amazon thats the size of a credit card thus fits great in my wallet so I always have it with me. Another thing to consider regarding JPEG – the latest DSLR cameras such as the Canon 7D offer extended high speed burst ranges to rapidly take dozens of images in one click of the button which can only be taken fully advantage of when shooting in JPEG as shooting in RAW will limit the burst range. This can mean the difference between catching that magical moment and missing the shot in sports photography!

Here are some of my favorite recent indoor wrestling shots that I captured using the tips mentioned above:

Hope you find these tips helpful. If you have any other indoor action shooting tips, please share!

Good luck shooting!

-Ken