How to Take the Perfect Jumping Photos

Jumping photos are fun to take and be in, so we are giving you some tips of how to take the perfect jumping picture, without a professional photographer or even a top of the range camera.

The first on how to take the perfect jumping picture is always to get close so that you look higher and enhance the effect of the jump. This also means, depending on the context for the jump, getting as much of the sky or background in the photo as possible to enhance the height of the jump. It also helps the impact, to create proper enhancing perspective, to be sure to have some of the floor or ground in the image. This helps to give a clear indication of the difference of depth between the jumper and the context. It sometimes also helps, specifically if this is your first attempt at achieving the perfect jumping photo, to take the image portrait rather than landscape in order to enhance the height of the jump. A flash and/or different lighting also helps to create the impression that the motion is frozen by extenuating the lighting and dramatizing the height or energy of the jump.

For a beginning start, it helps to start practicing and playing around with a wide angle lens, low angle and close range to take the perfect jumping picture. You don't need the highest of the range camera to achieve the perfect jumping photo, it just takes a little patience to get familiarise yourself with how you need to take the photo, the composition you need of the surrounding context jump and how to manipulate the camera and the jumper to achieve the perfect jumping photo... so play around with it. It often helps to fiddle with the shutter speed and set it to around 1/500 or faster to perfectly capture the jumping motion and freeze it to create a 'flying' motion.

Timing is also extremely important when working out how to take the perfect jumping picture. You ideally want to capture the image at the highest point of the jump and place the person at the apex of the image so to provide the greatest focus on your person and jump. In order to do this, for beginners or depending on the speed of your reflexes, try to capture the image, just before the person reaches the height of the jump so that you can get the image captured at the height of the jump. This is rather tricky to do, depending on your photographic experience level, or using a new or unfamiliar camera, so it will take some time to practice and play around with different effects, jumps and camera angles. It is worth spending some time to decide what you want to do with the jumping photo as this will change the way that you plan and take the jumping photo.

Jumping photos are not the easiest to take but once you get more familiar with the perfect timing to capture the photo, and how to enhance the image that you want to achieve, you are set on the way to achieving the perfect jumping photo.