Sports Photography by George Ross

In sports photography, if you see it and press the shutter it is to late you will have missed the moment. It only takes a fraction of second for a receiver to pull a ball down to safety of for a bat to hit a line drive or for an upper-cut to land. Our human reflexes are simply not quick enough to react to the action.

We must know what is about to happen to shoot it; and therein lies the mantra of a good sports photographer…capturing what is ‘about to’ happen. In the example above Hamilton Accies defender, Jamie McCarthy, leaps well above the slide-tackle from the over-enthusiastic John Rankin (Hibernian).

How did I catch this shot? Well, it comes down to having a good understanding of the sport that you are shooting and especially all of the inside stuff that goes on within  any given sport. In this match, about five minutes before the play above,  referee Winter made a call which caused the home team (Hibernian) fans to erupt in anger at this ‘poor’ referring decision and this was immediately followed by a couple of tackles that were ‘finished off’. Now, from my vantage point on the sidelines, I could feel the anger of the crowd transfer to the players – I had 18,000 angry fans breathing down my neck. It was only a question of time until someone would take the law into their own hands. I knew there would be a bad tackle, I could feel it….it was only a matter of time.

The settings for this shot:

• Aperture-priority
• Center-weighted average metering
• ISO 3200  (it was night game in the rain)
• 1/800th
• f/2.8 @ 400mm

Unfortunately, I was not using my own gear due to the difficulty in insuring my gear to travel, so I rented a  Canon EOS 40D and the wicked Canon 400mm f/2.8 from Calumet Camera in Edinburgh