The decent weather is finally here and if there’s one thing synonymous with an English summer, it’s cricket. Assuming the rain stays at bay, a day spent on the village green with your camera in hand is a wonderful way to get some great photos and a nice tan whilst relaxing in beautiful surroundings. Have we sold it yet? This week we’ll give you our top tips for taking great cricket images... 

While you could take a few snaps with a compact camera, to get close enough to the action to really tell the story you’re going to need some kind of telephoto lens. A decent 70-200mm with extender, 70-300mm or 300mm prime coupled with a quality DSLR or CSC body is the order of the day here for smaller venues. A crop body will give you a reach advantage, which is very useful for sports photography, but don't discount a full frame camera if you're close enough to the action.

You might want to take along a tripod and shutter release cable too, but more about that later…

As with all forms of photography, being in the right place at the right time is crucial and never is this more important than with sports photography.

To begin with set yourself up on the off side boundary between 8 and 10 o’clock (if the batsman is at 12 and the bowler at 6) because this will give you the best view of the majority of batsman who will be right-handed. Many people will tell you to stay where you are throughout, but with village cricket this is less important, so feel free to move around the ground as you hunt for different angles. Just be sure that you’re never directly behind the bowler as you’ll put off the batsman.

The other factor to consider is the quality of your background. You could have the finest light available, but if the background behind the players is too cluttered your photos will look busy and ugly, so bear this in mind when you scout a venue for shooting. Often park cricket makes for the best photos because the backdrop is usually green. 

Join us next week on our blog where we’ll bring you part 2 of our tutorial on photographing cricket. You never know, you might take something that the sports fan in your family would like to see printed on a canvas!