Don't be afraid to crop your photos with your post processing software to hightlight the subject matter most important to your shot. There aren't very many photos that I post on this blog or my customer site that aren't cropped. It's very difficult to frame a photo perfectly when capturing sports photography. Let the crop function be your friend.
Original photo
Single player subject
Two player subject
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I think it's ok to be a little creative with the sports photos you choose to display or sell. A little creative post processing can go a long way to making a boring or throw-away photo into something worth posting or selling.
The top photo was simply cropped, and desaturated. In addition to the cropping and desaturation, the bottom photo was also sharpened significantly to give it that old grainy look.
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Sports photography under stadium lights is difficult even in the best environments. But if you want to capture the action in these environment, you have to get out there and shoot. Of course your equipment really matters when the lighting is poor. A camera body that has good high ISO performance helps. But to really get those photos you'll like, you probably should invest in a decent (and probably expensive) lens. A lens with a maximum aperture setting of f/2.8 is essential (and of course one that has enough reach to capture the action not close to the photographer if that's required).
The photo above was captured using a Nikon 300mm f/2.8 lens attached to a Nikon D300 camera. The camera setting were: 1/800 shutter speed, f/2.8 aperture, ISO 4000
No noise reduction was used in post-processing. This photo was just cropped and lightened a bit using Apple Aperture.
Notice how the feet are in focus sharp. But the head and ball are not. This suggests that the 1/800 shutter speed was not quite fast enough to get all of this particular action completely blur-free sharp. I used manual mode for this shot, which means that the shutter speed, aperture and ISO settings were set by me entirely - not at all automatically by the camera. I also used center-weighted metering to give more emphasis for the camera's metering processing to the subject and not to the darkness in the background as matrix metering would have done.
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If you've ever wondered how to create this partial color affect in your photos, check out this "how to" video from About.com. There's a commercial you'll have to watch first. Sorry about that.
Get Photoshop for Windows.
...Or Photoshop for Mac.
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