Sports photography

A telephoto lens brings distant subjects close and holds onto fine detail while doing it. That makes it the obvious tool for sport, birds, wildlife and aviation, and it is easy to assume from that list that a telephoto lens is specialist equipment for people who do this for a living.

It is not. A telephoto lens is just as much at home at a school athletics meeting, at a family portrait session in a back garden, or pointed at a ridgeline from a viewpoint an hour outside town. This guide covers what defines a telephoto lens, the three focal-length bands it divides into, the subjects it suits best, how to shoot with one cleanly, and what to weigh up when you are choosing one.

A telephoto lens is a lens with a focal length of roughly 80mm or longer on a full-frame camera. Its narrow angle of view makes distant subjects look larger, compresses the distance between foreground and background, and blurs the background easily. On an APS-C camera, lenses from about 55mm upward give the same telephoto

Baseball and softball ask more of a camera than almost any other sport played on a South African field. The action arrives in short, explosive bursts at unpredictable moments, the players are a long way from wherever you are standing, and the light is either brutally hard or draining away faster than it feels like it is. Get the settings right and you come away with photographs that carry real weight — a bat meeting the ball, a fielder stretched full length, a junior player's face in the second before a pitch arrives. This article covers how to photograph sports on the diamond: the exposure settings that freeze movement, a scene-by-scene approach that puts you in the right position, and how to choose a lens with the reach to get there.

Start with an ultra-telephoto lens when you photograph sports at distance

Start with an ultra-telephoto lens when you photograph sports at distance

Distance is the defining problem. On a full-size diamond, the gap from a spectator position to the pitcher's