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Keeping your eye on the ball

As every sports photographer knows, when there’s a ball in play, it has to be in the frame. There’s even a rude expression used on sports picture desks for pictures that fail to include it. But that’s not all, because it’s the play around it that gives the shot its character.

Even so, there are times when the ball itself is the real interest, rather than what’s being done to it. Admittedly not often, but here in the Caribbean city of Cartagena, Colombia, was one of those occasions. I should explain that we’re in Rafael Nuñes, one of the CK tugurios, or slums of this hot destination city, rather than in the fashionable and historic old centre. As in most South American cities, there has been a steady accumulation of people arriving from the countryside and villages, attracted by the better possibilities of making a living. Typically, new arrivals on the outskirts begin as squatters, but then the makeshift settlements become legalised simply because the municipality has to deal with the growing population. Infrastructure comes slowly, and there’s always a need for schools and community centres, which tends to get fulfilled by charities.

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Keeping your eye on the ball

This long preamble is by way of setting the scene for the most frayed football I have ever seen, and it’s some kind of miracle that it could still be inflated and work. On Saturday mornings, there’s football training for the kids on the waste land close to the lake, given by a professional and sponsored by a charity, the Granitos de Paz Foundation. By the time it starts, the sun is way higher than I would have liked, but that can’t be helped. The class practice dribbling down a line of cones, and at the end, they each have to kick the ball. I work out my position after having seen this happen a few times, and go for the 200mm end of the 70-200mm zoom, to keep things compressed and to isolate boy-and-ball from the surroundings.

With every detail of the ball needed crisply, speed has priority over everything, and I’m taking no chances. As usual, my default mode is Aperture Priority, and in this light I’m confident that even at ISO 200, it’s going to be a fast shutter speed if I set a wide aperture on the 70-200mm. Now you could well argue that it would be more sensible to choose the shutter speed by using Shutter Priority, but we all have our idiosyncrasies, and I’m more comfortable using one mode whatever I’m shooting. I’m going to take a chance on a wide aperture, and it’s ƒ3.5, which will not be forgiving if there’s the slightest focus inaccuracy, but again I’m fairly confident about another piece of camera technology, and that’s Nikon’s focus tracking. What happens with my Nikon D4 is that I’m offered some sophisticated choices based on what happens in sports photography (one of Nikon’s strengths). I use ‘Focus tracking with lock-on’ from the menu, which will almost certainly keep my scrappy ball sharply focused wherever it moves in the frame. With all this in mind, I’m happy to keep the ISO (and therefore the noise) very low at ISO 200. The shutter speed, when I look at the results later, is an impressive 1/3200sec, which certainly stops every movement.

Football practice in Rafael Nuñes, Cartagena, Colombia 2009

sequnce

The burst

Over 2 seconds, with the shutter set on fast continuous, these were the 4 images that covered the kick. The one chosen was a natural, not least for both the boys feet being off the ground.

Michael FreemanOther articles by author

In a 40 year career, internationally renowned photographer and author Michael Freeman has focused on documentary travel reportage, and has been published in all major publications worldwide, including Time-Life, GEO and a 30-year relationship with the Smithsonian magazine. He is also the world’s top author of photography books, drawing on his long experience.
In total, he has published 133 books, with 4 million copies sold, including 66 on the craft of photography, published in 27 languages. With an MA in Geography from Oxford University, Freeman went first into advertising before launching his career in editorial photography with a journey up the Amazon.

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