Sports Photography Tip: Expose for the Grass

You have now become the home school gym class teacher and family yearbook photographer. It's now time to elevate our game by combining these two to get better sports photos.

Have you ever had your camera set for automatic exposure and most of your pictures come out too light or too dark?

exposure, your sensor will get fooled and your pictures will come out too dark or too light.

This happens because your camera sensor gets fooled. The subject may be too small in your frame and the camera gets fooled if there is a lot of sky or the color of the shirt is really dark. This will result in your pictures either being over exposed or under exposed.

A general rule of thumb I have learned is that a grass field is very similar to skin color when exposing. This may not be the case for a bright synthetic field or it may not work if the sun is close to the horizon. Clouds may also interfere.But in general, I think of the outfield grass as a giant grey card.

So try this. Make sure your camera is in manual mode for exposure. Fill the entire frame with a grass field where your kids are playing. Do a meter reading (the focus does not matter). Take a picture. Now take a picture of your kids in action and you should have a pretty close (if not spot on) properly exposed picture.

Camera settings: 1/1000 sec; f4, ISO 1000 Manual