Paintball Photography: Lense Advice

Lenses are a key part of taking the perfect picture. On one hand lenses are by and large the most expensive items and on the other hand they become the most expendable items for a paintball photographer. A frisky player may remove a thousand dollar lense with only one ball, but that's part of the risk of covering extreme sports.

What makes an ideal lense for paintball ? The answer lies in more then one idea. Price vs quality is the biggest issue for photographers in general and this idea also applies here. But before you go and out and buy a several thousand dollar lense however you should consider how close you plan on getting to your subject. Are you covering a tournament indoors or on a field with little sideline room ? Then you should consider using a medium length lense around 40-90mm to get a wider prospective view of the field. If you have the luxury or misfortune of having to shoot from 40+ yards you should consider using telephoto type lenses in the range of 70-300 or 300-1000+ mm range. Some working pros will carry two cameras on to the field with two different lenses: a telephoto for close shots and a medium aspect lense to catch different perspectives of the game.

Prices for a good lense can have large range. If your on a budget a simple telephoto 70-300mm lense by Tamron or Sigma would work and these lens are best for getting close up shots or wide aspect at longer ranges. Prices for these base-level lenses range from $90 to $340. The majority of sports photographers now days use a Canon EOS style lense on a Canon body because they have faster auto-focus speeds. The faster the auto-focus on cameras the clearer the pictures and the easier it is to capture moving subjects such as paintball players and paintballs. Canon also produces USM Image Stabilized lenses which are used for the vast majority of hand-held paintball photography. For those using Nikon bodies an adaptor ring can be used to convert a Nikon lense mount to a Canon lens mount. Both companies produce excellent quality I.S. style lenses that range in price and size from $500 to $12000. Other auto-focus slr and dslr lenses are just not as fast as the Canon but the trade off is that you can shoot longer bursts of dslr shots and have larger buffers on other camera bodies. Tradionally glass lenses are treasured items for photographers, however these expensive lenses should be left at home as the impacts of paintballs will easliy reduce them to pile of broken glass. Tripods are a good idea when not using image stabilization and you can read more about stabilizing options here.

For those who own point and shoot unfortunately your stuck with what the manufacturer provided you with. However, for prospective point and shoot buyers you should look for large size optical lenses for best performance. Now days with smaller and smaller digital ccd and cmos sensors lense size is very important. This is because of the physical amount of how much light can be focused on those little sensors, the larger the fixed lense the more light and thus better quality in your pictures. Most good point and shoot cameras will have power zoom which has a range from wide aspect to telephoto zoom. Normally point and shoot lenses have about a 20-320mm 35mm camera equilvilant range. The downside to P+S cameras is that they are unable to catch moving objects because of the auto-focus systems used on them. It can be downright frustrating trying to cover paintball with this style of camera. For some relatively fast capable P+S cameras there is the Panasonic: Lumix line that is incredibly lightweight and has comparable performance. Canon has the IS 3 which comes standard with image stabilization and a 30-400mm lense. One last camera is the Fuji line with it's 5200/9000 series.