Which lens for team photos?

welshnige

I have a Canon 450 dslr, I do a lot of amateur sports photos which Im getting to grips with quite smoothly. I am however struggling with team photos, anyone know what sort of lens I should really be using for these?
Any help much appreciated.

hc25036

What lenses do you have? Best bet might well be a "nifty 50" (ie a 50mm f1.8) which can be had for around £70. Use a widish aperture (say f4 or so) to throw the background out of focus and you should be able to fit everyone in without having to stand too far back. If you have a zoom, try to use a setting around 35-50mm - any smaller and the edges can look odd and any longer shortens things too much.

Just had a look at some I did at the weekend - my 24-105 zoom was set at 35mm and f4.0 for a couple of cricket teams taken with my 40D.

LondonLass

welshnige wrote: »

I have a Canon 450 dslr, I do a lot of amateur sports photos which Im getting to grips with quite smoothly. I am however struggling with team photos, anyone know what sort of lens I should really be using for these?
Any help much appreciated.

Not sure what you mean by team pics. Do you mean a line up of players or individual head and shoulders? In either case i would suggest some fill flash would help depending on the light at the time.

welshnige

Sorry if I was a little vague. I take photos for my local rugby club and where as I am getting "action" shots off to a finer art I am struggling with getting team photos. As you can appreciate the teams line up normally in two rows between the posts, now the photos I have seen in the Clubhouse normally have most of the posts in height as well as the team, my photos dont seem to be like that and I am thinking that perhaps I need a different lens for team photos. I have an 18-55mm and the 75-250mm canon lenses at the moment, perhaps its my editing thats wrong?

sickparrot

The lenses you have should cover ever focal length you would normally require, exept maybe extreme wide angle, but the the photo's would look pretty distorted, can you post examples?

isofa

If you are using a wide angle, try not to get too close to the players, you'll get distortion and unnatural looking faces, accentuated noses etc. You should be fine with the lenses you have, just stand in the right place and compose. If you can get far enough back, the longer lens will effectively give you the same coverage as the wider lens, you can make the background / clubhouse look closer than it is, and get a better background blur than with the wide angle.

Rather than relying on the zoom of the camera, move yourself to find the optimum position.

Remember than with a 450D (or and xxxxD, xxxD and xxD) it's a crop frame sensor, so effectively your lenses equate to 1.6x, so your 18-55 gives 28.8-88mm and the 75-250 gives 120-400mm.

I tend to either use a 17-40 L (for large groups) or 24-105 L for main portraits, (most pros would use somewhere between 50 and 85mm for portraits).

Are you using a flash for fill-in? Really for a good group shot you need a decent flash gun for fill-in. The cheapest high quality would be the Canon 430EX, but you'd need to ensure you are within the range for the shot.

hc25036

Have a look in your PMs.

I have to say I don't like the team photos you describe, but you would have the choice of using either of your lenses in portrait mode - the long one from around the half-way line(!) or the wide-angle (no wider than around 30mm) a bit closer. You'd then have to edit the frame size, and probably not use a standard photo size to make it look OK. The risk is that you may have to crop so much that you loose quality - do you use a tripod?

welshnige

Thankyou all. Looks like it will be trial and error for a while......probably more error than trial :-P