skiing/snowboarding photography

skiing/snowboarding photography[edit]

Woops...sorry about that!!

I meant to post:

I have never done any skiing/snowboarding photography before and my friend has asked me to photograph him in a professional skiing competition he is taking part in tomorrow. He will be doing jumps, rails, etc.

My questions are:

1. What should I set my metering mode at? multi-segment, center weighted, or spot???

2. Should I set my auto focus mode to continuous AF since i will want it to keep focusing as I am shooting??

3. Should I use a wide angle lense of my 70-200 zoom lens?

4. Is there anything specific I need to adjust on my camera? I understand I need a fast shutter speed for still shots, and I know how to pan.

5. Any other tips or hints would be perfect!!!


Thank you very much

How did it go? Ideally you'd want 400mm-600mm unless you're standing right up on him. Servo AF, fastest burst rate. I would just chimp the first few shots with the histogram to get the snow exposed and see how that matches to the skier. Maybe bump it up a bit if the skier is underexposed and try not to completely blow out the snow.

Id also love to see a few, I took my DSLR Snowboarding with me, and got a few good shots, as long as I wasnt moving

I'd very rarely suggest kit on these types of questions, usually a bit of creativity will beat the need for kit, but photography on snow is hard enough at the best of times, but with a fast moving target from distance, you really have your work cut out. Depending on how far you are away, I'd say you'd want 300mm effective (35mm equiv), but more importantly a fast shutter... that usually means expensive and requires very fast AF on the longer lens, especially considering the narrow DoF.

You need to experiment; for exmaple if you're shooting upwards (i.e. the sky will be the background) and it's overcast, you'll probably be fine with multi; but if the snow is more than 1/3 of frame, I'd go for spot and under expose 1/3 (shoot in RAW and fix it later if required).

I agree with VI, servo AF is a given and if your continuous shoot is fast enough, you might want to do bracketing.