Sports photography presents some unique challenges. The action is sometimes fast and furious. This requires a quick mind and a mastery of the camera in order to get the shot you want. Preparation is important and knowing the game or sport inside and out are extremely important.
One camera feature that is overlooked is fps: frames per second. This demarcation represents how many frames can be captured for each second the shutter release is held down. My old D70, for example, featured 3 frames per second. This wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t very good when the speed of the action picked up.
Now enter my recently acquired D300, which features 6 frames per second. I anticipated an improvement, but the actual results blew me away. It was impressive not only to hear the rapid succession of the frames being recorded within each second, but the amount of action I could freeze with the camera was amazing!
I am planning on adding the vertical battery grip, which will up the speed to 8 frames per second!
Speed isn’t everything, but sometimes it is very nice to have a camera doing better than keeping up with the action.