Kid Soccer

Grand kids Brayden and Sophia have been playing youth soccer.  The season has progressed through 9 games.  I have been to most of the games and taken lots of photos.  I'll show you some of the photos a bit later but here are some things I have learned about getting good photographs.

Day Games:  In one sense day games are easier to shoot.  There is a lot more light which means you can use higher shutter speeds to "freeze" motion and still use a fairly low ISO setting.  A low ISO setting means you can avoid noise in your photo that ends up looking like "grain" from high speed film.  You can use almost any lens in the day.  I like a fairly long focal length so you can keep the point of action (the ball) at a large enough size on the frame to recognize what is going on.  I have used a prime lens and the size of the action varies as the ball moves up and down the field.  

Night Games:  The park where the soccer is played in Mesa, AZ has nice lighting.  Here I do use a 85mm f/1.8 lens because of its light gathering power.  In order to come close to freezing action at night, I have had to adjust the ISO up into the noisy range.  I found that setting ISO at 3200 or 5000 will give me a shutter speed of 160th to 200th of a second.  Those shutter speeds freeze most action but sometimes feet or hands will exhibit motion blur. 

The Players:  Sophia is 5 years old.  She aggressively follows the ball and dukes it out with the other team to take possession.  Brayden  is 6 years old.  He is very athletic and enjoys running up and down the field. 

Sophia Goes For The Goal

Sophia moves the ball.

Sophia and her team mates.

Brayden.

 Brayden on goal.

Brayden after the ball.

One other thing:  Crop your photos.  Sometimes the action gets lost in the clutter of the full frame.  Crop the full frame to isolate the action.