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Choosing the right ISO, Aperture, and Shutter Speed for sports and action is super important, but there are a bunch of other camera settings that can make a huge difference to your sports photography.

Today I’m going to tell you what those settings are, starting with changing your Drive mode to Burst Mode.

Burst mode is great for action, because it allows you to take a sequence of photos of the action as it’s happening, making it much more likely that you’ll get the keeper shot you were looking for.

Second, change your focus mode to Continuous Focus.

Continuous Focus was literally made for sports and action photography.

With continuous focus, as long as you hold your shutter button halfway down, the camera will track and adjust focus as your subject moves through the scene.

Third, if you pan your camera, you might want to turn on image stabilization.

With sports photography image stabilization is typically not helpful, but there are now Image stabilization options to help you get sharper photos when panning the camera to follow your subject.

Fourth, activate all of your focus points.

When using continuous focus, the camera needs all the focus points it can get to track and maintain focus on your subject.

You should also check your camera manual because some cameras have special focus point zones specifically for sports and action.

Not every camera has the option, but if you do have it, it’s worth using because it optimizes the focus system for accuracy while photographing moving subjects.

Finally, you need to decide if you want to capture in RAW or JPEG.

The advantage of RAW is that you have the extra editing latitude that all the RAW data gives you, but shooting in RAW slows the camera’s burst mode down because RAW photos are much larger than JPEGs.

This is a problem because when the memory is full, the camera can’t take anymore photos.

And if the camera stops shooting, you could miss your shot.

So you have to consider the benefits of each and decide for yourself.

If you want that RAW editing capability, then shoot it in RAW.

If you want as much burst ability as possible, shoot it in JPEG.

If you do choose to shoot in JPEG, it will be critical to make sure you’re exposure and white balance are just right, because you won’t have as much latitude with the photos when you sit down to edit.

And with these settings locked in, you and your camera will be ready to capture all the action!