Shooting Middle School Sports

I have been substitute teaching in the Kyrene Middle School District this year.  The Kyrene District is based in Tempe, Arizona.  At one point this spring the coach at one of my schools asked me to shoot photos of the team's games.  When you shoot one game you are really shooting two teams.  Because I teach all all of the middle schools in the district, I have an interest in taking a nice photo of every kid who plays.  I have shot 2 track meets, 4 boys baseball games, 1 boys basketball game, and a bunch of girl's basket ball games.

Here are a few of the things that I have learned:

a.  Chain-linked fences really get in the way of your shots,  especially if your lens has an objective diameter more than 52mm. 

b.  You need to keep your shutter speed up in order to freeze action.

c.  Indoors, in order to shoot fast enough to freeze action,  you will need to shoot with a high ISO.  For the basketball games I was shooting ISOs at 3200 or 4000 and using lenses with maximum apertures of f2.8 or faster.  The high ISO resulted in noise that looked like film grain.  I was able to correct the noise in post-processing.

d.  If your camera has a multi-shot function, use it. 

I processed the photos in Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Adobe Lightroom.  At  times I played with the presets in Lightroom to get a different look.

I have some examples of my work below.