On Wednesday 5 February we were delighted to welcome Steve Williams from Wellingborough with his talk “Sports Photography – From Athletics to Tennis”.

Steve is mad about sport and likes nothing more than photographing it.

Steve’s aim was to show us that you do not need a press pass to photograph sport.  There is plenty of amateur and professional sport around.  His advice was just phone up and ask if you can come along and take photographs.  He has often been allowed into events free and given all necessary access to take his photographs.  And it is often possible to get great images from the public areas.

Nor, he said, do you need the biggest and fastest lenses to get good images at sports events.

Steve has been using Olympus kit since 2018 and shoots with the Olympus E-M1 Mk II and a selection of Olympus Pro lens.  The Olympus “four thirds” system has a crop factor of about x2 giving greater magnification.

He recommends starting in continuous shooting mode.  But he has been doing this sort of photography for so long now that he can often get his image using single shot shooting.  And he is happy to rely on autofocus for the vast majority of his shots.

He aims for sharp shots and is happy to experiment with shutter speeds to get the right effect.  Judges in competitions often complain about the crowded or busy background in sports images.  But, even using a wide aperture and looking for the most advantageous shooting position, you usually can’t do much about the background.

Steve’s talk covered a very wide variety of sports.

There was athletics, cricket (about the only sport Steve does not like), tennis, speedway, American football (“hard to photograph as there’s so much going on”), motocross, canoeing (at Lee Valley), ice hockey (at Milton Keynes), three-day eventing, “tough mudder” races, football, weightlifting, polo, windsurfing, kitesurfing and surfing (in Hawaii!), basketball, rugby, quadbike and sidecar racing, greyhound racing (at Towcester), motorbike racing (at Mallory Park and Silverstone), and jet ski racing.

The huge variety of sports covered, with the vast number of images he showed us, made this a veritable feast for the sports fans among us.  And, on the photography front, it certainly proved that there are plenty of easily accessed opportunities available to develop our skills in this sort of photography.