Setting up your camera for sports is really quite simple; there is a scene mode for it and it does give us the flexibility we need so I don’t mind using it at all.

Go ahead and set your mode dials to SCN for scene and here in the top, right is sports. Go ahead and press set, and does sport scene is going to do is it’s going to try and achieve the fastest shutter speed possible, given the amount of available light. You don’t want to use the flash because the subject is much too far away and it won’t help at all especially if you’re in any kind of stadium taking a picture of a sporting event, I see people using the flash all the time and dark low lit stadiums but it doesn’t do anything. So keep the flash down, don’t turn it on, it’s not necessary. Go ahead and press the quick menu button, hold that down for a second to access the menu.

You have a few focusing options but what I like using is just the standard area focus. You may have to use the manual focus and I’ll show you why in a second. Move over to wide balance, this is very nice. You can change the wide balance, auto may not be the best so go with daylight if you’re outdoors and it’s a sunny day. If it’s cloudy or if you’re in the shade choose cloudy or shade to sort of increase the warmth in the picture a little bit. I’m going to go with cloudy and go ahead and press set. Now with the wide balance properly set, you can move on to setting the burst mode. Because we’re taking pictures of sports, what you want to do is capture a moving target and then may be very, very difficult to time that because digital camera sometimes take a little while to take the picture. So pressing the burst mode button down here, you have a couple options, you go down to normal, press set and I’ll show you why. Because I’m using a high quality JPEG with the normal burst option, I’m going to be able to take up to four pictures at a rate of about two and a half per second.

If I had chosen the unlimited, then I’ll be able to take as many pictures as I want but only have a rate of about two per second. So I feel like I don’t need anymore than four pictures to capture the image the way I intended. So I’ll stick to normal burst. Next thing is focusing, if the target is constantly moving and you can’t lock focus before the action happens then you may need to use the manual focus. What I mean by that is press the shutter button halfway, try and lock focus on your target. If you can’t lock focus on the target, but the target is continuously moving back and forth within approximately the same area then you can try and move your focusing square to something else that is not moving. Press the shutter button halfway to lock on that, assuming you has got something is at roughly the same distance from the camera then recompose.

Keep the shutter button pressed halfway so that distance that with you focus remains locked and then when the action happens, go ahead, press the shutter button the rest of the way, and hold it here so the camera takes those four pictures one after the other. Remember, you want to press the shutter button just before the action happens because you won’t be able to time this very well. If you wait for the action to happen and then press the shutter button you’ll probably have missed it. So press the shutter button before, hold it down, and hopefully one of the pictures will capture the shot the way you like. If you’re not having any luck focusing on the subject or on anything at roughly the same distance, then what I would recommend doing is simply using the manual focus. So move your focusing switch here to manual focus and then set the manual focus to infinity. Use the quick menu joystick to move that up all the way until it gets to infinity. I’m assuming the subject is at a distance greater than 20 feet from your camera or about 8 meters. So infinity should be just fine. Press the shutter button halfway, not to focus but to kind of prop the camera and then just before the action happens, press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the pictures.

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