Youth Soccer

[Mauravdl]

Like another poster, I have a son in youth soccer and I've been practicing my very newb photo skills at their games.

The first games I got a lot more blurring than I wanted or liked (and I thought 1/250 was pretty fast for shutter speed!), so last week's game I tried a faster shutter speed (and iso).

The pattern I noticed this last week was that I was having a lot of instances where the autofocus was fixating on things I didn't really want (nearer idle players, etc). I don't think I'm up to manual focus this fast but wanted to ask if there was a trick to this I could use. Would turning on spot focus in the middle help and then I'd just have to remember to center what I wanted to focus on, then recompose?

I'm learning - not as fast as I want but I'm learning.

Here's an example of last week's photos. The one knee is OOF a bit. The grass really is as crackly and dry as it looks.