Sports Photography: How To Capture Fitness Moves With Your Camera

Introduction

If you want to flex your fitness moves and show off your workout results, you don’t need to hire a professional photographer to capture photos for you.

In fact, you can capture your fitness moves perfectly with your own camera. All you have to do is to enrich your photography skills.

For instance, if you do yoga daily, make sure to check out some yoga photography tips to help you.

But, regardless of your sports photography skills, below are some of the ways to capture your best fitness moves:

Use Burst Mode And Fast Auto-Focus

If you want your camera to keep up with your fast movements, you may want to set it to focus on you continuously instead of locking on to a single spot. You should also set your camera to take different images, which can be done by enabling burst mode in your camera or by configuring your camera’s frames per second.

Find these settings on your camera and see to it that they’re turned on when shooting your fitness moves. If you have an option to set the number of frames per second you want your camera to take, set it to maximum. It increases your chances of capturing your best shots. To know more information, visit this website.

Use A Plain Background

If possible, have a white background. However, using any solid color may work great. When capturing your fitness moves, you don’t want to have a lot of clutter in the background. It makes it hard for the camera to focus on you as there are other things in the background that distract your camera. But if you’re using a plain background, it won’t be your problem. The reason behind this is that your camera can quickly focus on you once you start doing your fitness moves.

Watch Your ISO

Shutter speed is essential, but to determine the right exposure, you also need to pay importance to your camera’s ISO. When you’re shooting in a semi-manual mode like shutter priority or aperture priority, you should set the ISO based on the time, lighting conditions, and location.

For instance, if you’re shooting in a sunny area, an ISO of 400 is perfect since there’s available light for your camera to use. If it’s a dull overcast day and there isn’t much light available, you should increase your ISO to around 800 to 1200.

Take Advantage Of Natural Lighting

It goes for any kind of photoshoot, most particularly if you don’t have somebody manning your camera. Although you can use a diffuser, the flash of your camera creates a harsh and unflattering light. In fact, in a dark setting, the pictures will be grainier and low quality even if you use a flash.

Sunlight or natural lighting may come in handy when capturing photos while doing body transformation exercises, especially if you don’t have more lighting gear available. However, don’t consider shooting in direct sunlight and you’ll be washed out.

Use A Tripod

To get your full body in photos, it’s beneficial to use a tripod. It’s worth your investment if you want to capture your fitness moves beautifully.

There are many tripods you can purchase for your needs. Depending on your budget, you have the freedom to choose any tripod available in the market. Just pick the one that will let you position your camera at an angle, which is important to get a picture that best shows the exercise.

Consider Using A Gimbal

Like your tripod, a gimbal stabilizes your camera so you can avoid blurry photos because of shaky hands. However, use a gimbal only if you have someone to help you capture your fitness moves. This will let your partner move the camera freely without unintentional movements to deal with. This may also help you achieve good shots.

Know The Right Camera Lenses To Use

When it comes to cameras, there are a variety of lenses you can choose from. If you’re using a mobile phone, a usual combination of lenses includes ultra-wide, telephone or wide angle. Such lenses aren’t the same and they don’t capture light the same. For example, ultra-wide lenses come with optical image stabilization.

Whether you’re capturing images or videos, the best choice for sports photography is a primary wide-angle lens. It’ll do great when capturing details, contrast, and lighting.

Use Your Camera’s Shutter Priority Mode

This setting is ideal if you’re using a camera that only enables shutter speed settings. Many cameras like point-and-shoot ones will let you set a shutter speed. Rather than configuring your camera in terms of how much light to let it, using the shutter priority mode allows you to tell the camera what speed you’d like the shutter to be in. Then, the camera will decide on what aperture to use.

When capturing beautiful fitness moves, setting your shutter to 1/500 is important. But make sure to test shots when setting the shutter speed manually in case you set it very high or there isn’t enough light for your camera.

Invest In Good Quality Lighting Equipment

If you don’t have a fixed time working out and you often exercise after work, it might be best to invest in good quality lighting equipment. You may use any lighting gear you can find online or in local stores. But make sure to consider how big or small your workout area is when choosing your lighting equipment.

Know Your Best Angles

Once you’re done setting up your camera, it’s time to determine your best angles. Depending on your preferences, whether you want a full-body or half-body shot, knowing your angles will let you capture your fitness moves with ease. If you don’t know your best angle, it might be a good idea to check out some references online. You can browse for ideas or ask someone to help you find your best angle.

Takeaway

Capturing your fitness moves with your camera may seem like an easy job and doing it perfectly isn’t impossible to achieve.

The only thing that you should do is to remember the tips mentioned above and to never stop improving your photography skills by practicing regularly.

If necessary, you may also reach out to professionals to get more helpful tips.

About Theresa Duncan

Originally from Detroit, MI, Theresa has been offering health and fitness advice for the last 30 years while working as an engineer. She decided to turn her passion into a profession, and finds nothing more satisfying than helping others reach their health and fitness goals.