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people ask me to look at their attempt at sports photography.)

In sports photography, you have to use a shutter speed of at least 1/200 of a second to stop the action, which is why I always shoot manual when I'm shooting sports. If I'm shooting high school football, it will probably mean increasing the iso to 1600 and shoot with an fstop of 2.8 or 3.5. Most lenses that come with the least expensive DSLRs are not "fast lenses." Fast lenses are lens that can be opened to small fstop numbers. An fstop of 2.8 is a good fast lens. The smaller the fstop of the lens, the larger the opening that has to allow light to hit the sensor.

Think of the fstop as a hose. An fstop of f22 could be compared to a garden hose, while an fstop of f2.8 could be compared to a fire hose. Because you need as much light as possible to flow to the sensor when you take night sports photos, you need an fstop like a firehose.

As you move from a wide open fstop, or aperture, to a more "closed down" aperture you decrease the amount of light hitting the focal plane. Each fstop has about half the light gathering area of the previous one.

The second way to improve your exposure if you need to adjust the amount of light is to change the shutter speed. The shutter speed is simply the amount of time the shutter remains open. A shutter speed of 1/200 means the shutter stays open for 1/200 of a second. A shutter speed of 1/100 means the shutter stays open for 1/100 of a second. Because its 1/100 is twice as long as 1/200 of a second, it means twice as much light will be allowed into the camera.

However, it's important to learn what will happen if you use a shutter speed that's too slow. As I stated earlier, you need a shutter speed of at least 1/200 to stop the action of people. Even at that shutter speed, you may get some blurring of fast action. As you start decreasing you shutter speed from there, you will eventually reach a point where you get "camera shake."

Camera shake is the movement of the camera while the shutter is open. There is not set shutter speed when camera shake starts to happen. It depends on the length of the lens, the person holding the camera and the type of lens.

In the old days a good rule of thumb was not to use a slower than the length of the lens. That meant if you were using a 50mm lens, you could usually hand hold the camera at 1/50 of a second. However, if you were shooting with a 200mm lens, you should not hand hold at a shutter speed of less than 1/200 of a second.

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