Thinking About Soccer Photos

My youngest made the varsity soccer team so I’ve been trying to make it to most of those games and take pictures. While I’ve shot a decent amount of soccer over the years, it’s mainly been fairly young teams who weren’t quite as adept at passing. I had gotten pretty comfortable with football. This feels pretty different and I’ve been missing some shots I really wanted. As a result, I’m trying some new patterns. I’ve also changed some technical aspects of how auto-focus is set up on my camera. The fact that soccer plays a million games also gives some increased flexibility as I don’t have to be as worried that trying something out for a game will mess up such a large portion of potential shots.

I’ve turned off the lens image stabilization. It’s something I never thought about much. I’d just left it on because . . . stabilization seemed good. I read a few things recently that led me to believe it slows down focusing and needlessly wears out the motor if you’re shooting at 1/1000 or faster anyway. I am, so I turned it off. I can’t really tell if it made a difference but maybe.

I changed my auto-focus pattern to Case 3. This is Canon lingo. I’ve only run this for one game so far and haven’t processed those pictures yet. We’ll see.

There’s a large concrete wall with a soccer goal outline painted on it on our home field. It seems like a fun thing to try to work into the background of shots. I should probably crop this one to get it to fully cover the background here.

Many of the games have been in pretty terrible light. While this one is overexposed, I liked the dramatic hair highlights. The net in the background is also kind of interesting. Again, I should probably crop it just a bit tighter to get the upper portion of the next out of the shot. It’s strange how I think I’ve done all the cropping necessary until I start writing these descriptions.

Soccer does allow you to get a lot more facial expressions. Headers are fun but it’s hard to strike a balance between making people look cool while heading the ball and capturing some really weird faces. This is my youngest mixing it up as an 8th grader.

Goal Shots

So I set the lens right for this shot. I’ve been trying to figure out better ways to make it clear that certain shots were goals. It’s hard when any isolated kick just looks . . . like a kick.

This shot, for instance, is a goal. Cool shot. Totally unclear it’s a goal.

Now we have a shot that didn’t score but an alternate attempt. The good thing is you can tell it’s a shot on goal but you can’t see the offensive player’s face. It ends up feeling more centered around the goalie.

This one was almost really cool. I think with some more effort I can make this work. You’ve got the goalie missing the ball, the defender with his head thrown back, and the offensive player. So close to something good.

This shot feels like it ends up being about the goalie too. That leg sticking in from the left is really distracting as well.

Headers

The challenge with these for me is two-fold. I want to show height and I want to be tight enough to make it interesting and dramatic. That makes cropping (and zooming for that matter) a challenging choice. It also happens fast and, as I said before, you don’t want pictures of people looking super weird. The goal here is to make the players look like superheros. I need to look at more soccer photos from pro games. I’m curious what that looks like and whether those players tend to keep their eyes open through a great portion of the header.¹

This one shows height pretty well. It’s not optimal in terms of drama. Face isn’t bad. I like the defender being way down there.

This one is borderline. I liked the rain. Feet are a bit cut off. Ball is a bit out of frame. It also focuses more on the other team. I end up with some great shots of the other team and don’t really know what to do with them. It feels like helping the enemy to get good shots of the opposing team.

This is more of a gentle guiding of the ball with his head but it’s the best face possible. Eyes are open. Ball is clearly in frame. Focus is a bit soft.

Probably too far away. Contrast is a mess. Still, I liked the expressions and the height. I could crop it but I also liked the left-to-right progression of bodies.

Green Wall

Contrast is rough but I really liked the series of lines- the green wall edge in sug, the white goal outline and the final green square outlining the action. It might be fun to do in black and white too.

Warm ups. The wall adds drama. The line is hard to get exactly level though. I could crop it out, but I liked the layers of green stripes in combination with the striped shirts and the ground with shadows.

That wall really does clean up the background.

And again, a nice background and some decent depth of field.

Tight

I’m shooting most of these games with a 150-600mm lens. That means I can only get so zoomed out. Zoomed fully in is a really challenging way to try to follow the ball. I have been doing all these games with the camera handheld. Basically, I squat and balance my elbows on my knees. I put my palm on the tripod mount and zoom with my fingers. It’s a bit awkward when things move really quickly.² I plan to try a monopod for the next game.

Ordinally, I try to get the full body in the shot for most sports shots. It’s easier to shoot zoomed out and then crop in post. That also gets kind of boring. I’m not shooting for money or media so I must amuse myself. I do feel an obligation to try to get shots of as many players as possible (especially if they don’t get to play much).

This one feels like it works. No ball in the shot which isn’t great. I’d rather not cut off the hand but focus is good and depth of field is working. Background is relatively distraction free.

This is at 1/1000 and you get some blur with the ball. The light is rough. I need to crop out the knee on the right.

Feet chopped off but ball in frame. Rain for added drama.

I’ve got a number of these shots where I’ve chopped off a portion of a poor kid’s head and part of the ball but it’s also a decent shot in other ways. I would probably delete them if it was just for me.

Rain drama. Our player is fully in frame but the defender ends up cropped in some odd ways and the background is pretty busy.

Not quite as close but backlighting and dramatic hair help make it fun. The bokeh is also doing a few neat things. This lens is at the max aperture of 6.3. I really, really want to be shooting with a 2.8 again but that’s not happening any time soon.

Portrait

I also try to get random portrait style shots. This is one of the few that I’ve liked.