Well, this was a first for me… I have never shot a soccer game before. I was lucky enough to be able to find a spot on the rooftop of the media booth, because the media booth had one window overlooking the soccer field and a man with a handy-cam essentially took away most key angles. Just another case of “early bird gets the worm” I suppose.
It didn’t take me very long to get accustomed to shooting the sport. Most sports are pretty similar to shoot when you think about it. You want to track the ball or object that is being transported to the destination – in this case the goal, you want to leave enough space in front of the player on the camera so it doesn’t look like he or she is going to run off the screen, and you want to keep in mind where a player could pass the ball – so zooming is a helpful feature on a camera when you need to get a good look at the options for a player to pass off to. Of course anyone who has shot sports will most likely know this already.
My challenge was to use a camera that had twice the zoom power on it, which was a great feature when it came down to capturing a nice lob pass to the forward’s leading foot and into the goal. Being from that far of a distance, I learned to make small and smooth adjustments when panning the camera across to follow the play.
When all was said and done, the shots came out pretty clear and I was fairly happy with the work.
