What lens(es) do I need for kids’ sports?

Which lens should I buy?

This seems like such a simple question.

In fact, I am asked this all the time. My kids are swimmers and I have been capturing them and their teammates in summer league, club meets, and now high school meets for years. I’ve also been the high school football photographer for a season, the middle school track team photographer, and I love to catch a quick shot of my adorable 8-year-old neighbor when she has a soccer game. I LOVE sports photography. I love the action, the emotion, and the feeling of capturing “the shot!”

To determine what gear you need, it is important first to consider what makes a great shot in sports. First and foremost, a clearly defined subject is extremely important. When you look at your photo, is it absolutely certain who the hero is in that shot? The right focal length on the lens can help you achieve that.

Secondly, does the subject “pop?” Do they stand out against any distractions in the background? The use of aperture will help you achieve this.

Finally, is your subject in focus? Have you stopped the action without hands or feet blurring? When you zoom in, is your subject crisp and clean? The shutter speed and the ability of the lens to focus quickly will help you achieve this.

There are so many other factors that go into a great sports shot: light, emotion, composition, shooting angle, sense of place, processing… the list goes on! However, if you focus on the three items above, you can elevate your photos from a mere snapshot to photographs that have impact and tell a story. The lens that you choose plays a critical role in your ability to do this. Let’s take a look at the elements of a lens and how they affect your picture.

FOCAL LENGTH

Focal length at its most basic is how wide or narrow the angle of view is that the lens can take in. If a 50mm lens is considered similar to what the eye can see, a number smaller than that would be considered a wide angle lens. So on the extreme end of this, the fisheye will take in a 180-degree angle of view and a lens larger than 50mm would be considered a telephoto. Telephoto lenses work extremely well in sports photography because they allow you to fill your frame with just the amount of the scene that you are trying to focus on. Consider this versus an iPhone photo. While the quality on your phone has gotten quite good, you are not able to zoom in and fill your frame with your subject easily due to the extreme wide angle of the phone lens.

At longer focal lengths, you get lens compression. Lens compression basically means it pulls everything together. It makes the background seem closer, or people or items in a line seem closer together. This is in contrast to a wide angle lens that exaggerates distance. Think once again of your iPhone. Have you ever tried to take a picture of a beautiful moon only to realize it seems small and so far away on your phone?

f/4, 1/500, ISO 6400 @300mm The background is pulled in close to the subject at 300mm and the crowd turns into beautiful colored bokeh.

f/4.5, 1/800 sec, ISO 5000 @ 200mm The lane ropes appear to get closer together as you move away from the subject.

f/4, 1/800, ISO 640 @ 300mm The helmets are compressed together creating a tight group @300mm.

One other thing to consider is whether you shoot with a crop sensor or a full frame camera. Most entry level DSLRs come with a crop sensor, which is actually a good thing in sports photography because it takes the focal length of your lens and makes it even longer! What does this mean? In its simplest form, it means that the camera actually “crops” your photo in closer when it takes the picture. In the example of a Canon Rebel, the crop factor is 1.6. So you take your lens and multiply it by 1.6 to get the focal length for your lens. Example: 24-105mm on a full frame camera equates to a 38.4-168mm on a crop sensor camera. It means you can get that much closer across a large soccer field and maintain maximum detail. That’s great news!

Related: What the crop? Full frame and crop sensors explained.

APERTURE

I believe the use of aperture is the single most important thing you can do to instantly improve your sports photography. Aperture is basically an opening in your camera lens that opens up wide, or closes down to a small hole, and controls whether you have background blur or an incredibly sharp photo from front to back. When your lens is “open wide” your subject is in focus and everything in front of and behind them falls into a lovely blur.

f/1.4, 1/4000, ISO 320 @ 50mm

f/2.8, 1/1000, ISO 500 @ 143mm

The level of blur created by aperture is increased when combined with a telephoto lens zoomed all the way into its highest number. Huh? That just means that if you take the lens that came with your camera at 18mm with the aperture set at f/3.5 and you compare that to a picture taken with a 200mm lens set at f/3.5 and you are the same distance from your subject, the 200mm will show far more blur in the background and your subject will really pop. Here is an example of 2 photos taken with a 70-200mm lens, with the aperture consistently set to f/2.8. The first one taken at 70mm shows much less blur than the second one taken at 200mm, which really isolates the main subject.

SHUTTER SPEED

In sports photography, your shutter speed should typically go no lower than 1/500th of a second and ideally 1/1000th of a second or higher. At speeds around 1/500th or lower you will begin to see the extremities blur, especially in your fast moving sports like football, lacrosse, tennis, and soccer. So what do you need to keep your shutter speed high? You need light! How do you get more light? You have 2 choices. You can either raise your ISO (not my first choice, and can be troublesome on older cameras as you introduce an unacceptable amount of digital noise,) or you can lower your aperture. Most professional photographers shoot with lenses that open all the way to f/2.8. The trouble with this is that those lenses can get expensive. We’ll talk about that in a minute!

f/2.8, 1/1000, ISO 100 @ 200mm

IMAGE STABILIZATION

Or vibration compensation, or vibration reduction, or optical stabilization… it is called something different by each lens manufacturer, but essentially this feature is extremely helpful in sports photography, especially with telephoto lenses. At the higher focal lengths, hand shake can become a real issue. A high shutter speed helps with this, but with the addition of image stabilization you can get sharp, shake free photos at even lower shutter speeds than you would be able to without it. In my opinion, it is worth the extra money.

JUST ANSWER MY QUESTION! WHICH LENS SHOULD I BUY?

Now that we know what elements make a great sports photo, as well as the elements in a lens that help us achieve that, it really gets down to price! Fortunately, there is a wide range of options available from the most budget conscious beginner to those who are ready to take it to the next level.

For someone new to photography or extremely budget conscious, a great, affordable choice is the 70-300mm f/4-5.6. It is available from all of the major lens manufactures (Canon, Nikon, Tamron, Sigma) at a very reasonable price and includes image stabilization. Many starter camera packages come with this lens as an addition to the 18-55mm “kit lens.” The Canon and Nikon versions are both less than $ 500 and are 4.5+/5 star rated on Amazon. The Sigma version is even more affordable at less than $ 150.

There are many pros to this lens including its ability to zoom in very tightly on your subject and isolate them from the background, creating beautiful background blur even at f/5.6. This is ideal for outdoor sports with great natural light such as soccer, daytime football, baseball, etc. Where it gets tricky is when the action moves indoors.

Sports such as wrestling, volleyball, basketball, etc. will find it much more challenging to achieve high shutter speeds due to the apertures that do not open wider than f/4 at 70mm and f/5.6 at 300. You will have to bump your ISO up to compensate for this. Unless you have a newer camera, you might find that you don’t like the amount of noise you see in the resulting photo. If this is your only option, “embrace the grain” and focus on proper exposure and great composition. No one is going to notice a grainy photograph if it is well exposed, at the peak of action, and has great emotion!

Shot with the Canon 70-300 f/4-5.6 @ 70mm f/4, 1/1600, ISO 100

Shot with the Canon 70-300 f/4-5.6 @ 300mm f/5.6, 1/1000, ISO 100 (notice even at f/5.6, you still get a nice background blur and lens compression)

As your budget gets larger, the next logical choice is a 70-200 f/2.8. This can get very expensive ($ 2000+) from the 2 big name camera manufacturers but there are more affordable options at great quality available from Sigma and Tamron. I personally own the Tamron 70-200 f/2.8 VC Di and I have never regretted it! It comes with a 6-year warranty that recently covered a full repair of the autofocus system! I had rented this lens so many times that I decided it was time to buy it.

Renting is great way to try before you buy. A couple of great options are Borrow Lenses, Lens Pro To Go, or Aperturent. Once you decide to buy, purchasing a used lens is another great option. Sites like KEH fully evaluate the lenses and rate them accordingly. You can buy a “like new” lens for significant savings.

If you find yourself shooting an indoor sport and cannot afford the 70-200 f/2.8 lenses, a less expensive option is the 85mm f/1.8. The Canon version costs $ 350 and allows you to zoom in fairly close and open the aperture very wide. If you shoot with a crop sensor camera, you get a bonus of an additional 51mm of focal length for an equivalent of a 136mm lens making this a real contender for indoor sports.

If light is typically not an issue, Tamron offers a multi-purpose lens that allows you to shoot wide and set the scene all the way through tight close-ups. This is their 28-300 f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD. This is not a cheap lens but essentially takes the place of 2 lenses at $ 849. I wouldn’t recommend this lens for indoor sports due to the fact that it can only open as wide as f/6.3 at 300mm, but would be a good option for outdoor daytime sports.

DON’T THROW AWAY YOUR KIT LENS!!

While the typical 18-55mm lens that come with your camera will not produce great action shots, don’t underestimate its value in giving your photos a sense of place. Balance your action shots with shots of the field, the participants, or the stadium. If you can, get up close or shoot down low to give your image a more thoughtful composition.

f/4, 1/500, ISO 2000 @ 24mm

The options can be overwhelming when you go to do your research, but if you keep in mind the fundamentals of a great sports photo and the minimum requirements that your lens needs to meet to achieve this, it makes your choices much less daunting. Have fun shooting and seeing the immediate difference in your sports photography!