STEELE SPORTS
Photography and visual storytelling has become one of my biggest passions since joining on with the Steele County Times five years ago, and nothing brings me more happiness than seeing photography become such a trending hobby around our local sporting events.
I see more and more aspiring photographers – of all ages, from high schoolers to retirees, I should add – mixing in with our talented pool of professionals who do amazing work in town and the surrounding areas.
While I spent a large chunk learning my camera skills through countless hours of trial and error, I feel now is the right time to share some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned to save our newer sports photographers some valuable time.
Shutter Speed
We’ll start with shutter speed because freezing the action is possibly the most critical component when it comes to taking sports photos.
For myself, a good rule of thumb is to use 1/1,000 as the baseline for eliminating motion blur.
More kinetic sports – use my soccer photo of Owatonna goalkeeper Carson Van Gelder as an example – will require even faster shutter speeds to fully capture the critical moments of the game while keeping your photos tack sharp.
The photo of Van Gelder was taken using a 1/2,000 shutter speed; ideal for capturing all of the small details of a split-second moment.
In an ideal world, we could use extremely high shutter speeds anywhere and everywhere to do our best work, but there is another metric that we have to balance in order to keep our shots metered properly.
By metered, I mean close to the “0” mark in the center of your metering bar in your camera’s window.
ISO
If you’re just starting out in photography, you might have been taught that this word is the equivalent of saying “Voldemort” in the Harry Potter series.
Fear not, for ISO is actually your friend – you just have to understand how to balance it.
I spent the early days of my career trying to keep my ISO as low as possible. So low that I even shot my photos darker than I needed thinking that it would be able to be corrected in post-production in Photoshop and Lightroom.
Do not make the same silly mistake that I did.
You always want your photos to be properly metered, so if you feel that you have to shoot with a high shutter speed, you’re going to have to shoot in higher ISOs as well.
Luckily for us spring sports photographers, the outside lighting helps greatly.
Indoors, I will normally be shooting sports from anywhere between 2,500 ISO – thank you Blooming Prairie High School for the stellar gym lighting – and 10,000 ISO.
Outside, you can get away with as low as 50 ISO if you are metering properly.
The best way to understand where your ISO should be is to look through your window and find the bar with a “0” in the middle of it.
If the arrow or line that appears over the bar is not centered and toward the left, your shots are too dark.
Thus, you must increase your ISO.
If the opposite is true and the arrow/line is on the right side of the center, then your shots are overexposed and you should lower your ISO.
The same can be done by adjusting shutter speed, however, I recommend adjusting the ISO first.
Another key to properly metering is to decrease your aperture to the lowest mark it can go.
The aperture or “F-stop” as some will call it, is the focal range of your camera.
Personally, I always keep my aperture on my Sony 70-200mm lens at its lowest possible reach.
The lens can go down to F2.8, and that’s where it stays in almost all circumstances.
Shot Selection
Outside of the technical basics, I believe the most valuable part of photographing any sport is looking for the “why” in the game.
It’s easy to follow the ball and capture action shots.
What I value as a visual storyteller is understanding the moment and capturing the emotion.
My shot of NRHEG teammates Gabby Schlaak and Clara Buendorf from the 2025 section championship game is a personal favorite example of this concept.
In the foreground, Quinn VanMaldeghem is preparing for a game-sealing free throw.
It’s a pivotal moment in the game, but in the end, it will be just another stat on the page.
While everyone else has their eyes trained on VanMaldeghem, I keep my eyes elsewhere, trying to find another part of the game that might go unnoticed.
The embrace between Schlaak and Buendorf is the “why” in that moment. Two friends sharing the thrill of impending victory – that’s the feeling I want to convey to the viewer.