Steely Images and Armchair Travel Notes: Don't Shy Away From Your Camera's Burst Mode

My 5-year-old grandson discovered the burst mode on my phone before I did. I picked it up one day and I had a couple of hundred selfies he had taken of himself! Don't get me wrong, I am well aware of continuous shooting on my Sony DSLR camera. In fact, I use it most of the time. Lots of hours are spent shooting sports on the sidelines or shooting over a fence to get the very best shot I can can get.

I'm not going to use my phone camera for doing this because I need the clarity of my 500mm lens or my 75-300mm zoom lens to get me right into the middle of the action. It also helps that my camera locks in the focus on the topic of my picture. Granted, my camera only shoots 5 frames per second but for sports action that's the minimal amount the I think is acceptable.

My assignments are not shooting professional or college sports but taking shots of the grandchildren. But the end results are stop-action photographs of professional quality that are usually selected for an end-of-the-season book for the featured player.

Action pictures take more than just bringing a camera to the game. It helps to understand what's happening and anticipate where the best pictures are going to be. Anticipating that a player might steal a base helps to know to pre-focus on the base being stolen. When the action begins start firing away before the player actually moves into the frame. What you'll get is a series of pictures worth editing for framing, book or gift. It really doesn't matter how many you take if you have one or more memory cards to hold pictures until you can up load them. In a Little League game I'll take 400 to 500 pictures to insure I get the right one.

The same goes for shooting wildlife and any action photography. As professional sports photographers know the odds of getting the perfect shot increases with the number of shots taken.

Sony, Nikon, Cannon and other camera manufacturers are now making sports photography equipment inexpensive and functional for nearly everyone. For most kid sport any zoom lens up to 300mm is the most desirable. Professional lenses costing thousands of dollars are very nice if that's what you do for a living. But for most people a good DSLR for their requirements only cost a few hundred dollars both new and used.

And, like most things, practice goes a long way in getting desired results.

There are two series of pictures below that I used my burst mode in anticipating the action. It the first series I was expecting the runner on 2nd base to steal 3rd base so I positioned my self where I could get the most action in the frames expecting the catcher to make a pick-off throw to 3rd. I was shooting over the fence right down the 3rd base line. My zoom lens was set at 300mm and the automatic setting locked the shutter speed at 1/500 using an iso of 1600. I was able to freeze the action using the burst mode. These four pictures were the ones I chose to demonstrate the effectiveness of continuous shooting. The were several frames taken before and after the slide action.