One dramatic difference you’ll while shooting a football game is how the light changes if you’re shooting a game that overlaps the sunset. This first game I shot ran the full gamut from daylight to sunset/shade to stadium lights. Experienced sports shooter should already known to shoot in aperture priority, but for those who are relatively new to this sort of thing, see this post for some points about exposure technique for outdoor sports using aperture priority.
Daylight
Anyhow, full daylight creates problems with extremely harsh shadows, particularly on player’s faces under helmets and such. The problem is exacerbated if you’re shooting at an angle where the player is backlit or even severely sidelit. For example, this might be a perfectly usable photo, but it doesn’t quite have the instant eye-catchiness of better sports photos – the entire image is really busy because the brightest-lit areas are the least detailed (field, crowd in background), and the important areas (player’s faces, bodies) are masked in shadow.
Washington State's Christopher Ivory about to collide with California linebacker Anthony Felder
Contrast this to this fully-lit photo (actually sidelighting from the right, but the player is facing that direction anyway). Now the brightest (and instantly eye-catching) area of the image is the player’s body and face, which also happens to be the most detailed area and the focus of the image:
California running back Jahvid Best evades Michigan State tacklers
The key for daylight then (without clouds) is to get into a position where the sun is coming from behind or to the side of you (but still relatively behind, if possible). Since most games are noon or later, the sun will tend to be on the west side where it sets, so the preference would be to shoot from the west end of the stadium (of course, you may not have this luxury, as sometimes they restrict you to the visiting team’s sideline). Another strategy is to simply shoot from the endzone – most all football stadiums are oriented facing north-south to avoid playing directly into the sun during sunlight games, so at the very worst you’ll have a side-lit image, which often isn’t bad at all, as the above photo shows.
A closer look at more difficult shaded and nighttime lighting conditions after the jump.
