Cricket Photography Settings for Club and Pro Matches
Cricket is awkward to photograph for a plain reason. The interesting part happens on a strip of grass about 20 metres long in the middle of a big field, and you are outside the rope, usually somewhere between 40 and 80 metres away depending on the ground. Settings matter, but the lens and the spot you stand in matter more.
How much lens you need
A batter is about 1.8 m tall. If you want one to fill half the height of a full-frame picture (12 mm of the 24 mm sensor height), the focal length you need is 12 times the distance divided by 1.8 m. From 40 m that is about 270 mm. From 60 m it is 400 mm. From 80 m it is 530 mm. On a crop sensor you can divide those by about 1.5 and get the same framing.
So a 70-200 is fine for close fielders and celebrations, and not much use for batting from the boundary at most grounds. People who shoot cricket regularly tend to end up on 400 or 500 mm, often on a monopod or tripod because those lenses are heavy and the days are long. If you already have a photo from a match, the Subject Distance Calculator will tell you how far away you were, which is a quick way to find out what lens you would have needed.
Shutter speed for a bowled ball
Quick bowlers send the ball down at around 40 m/s, which is about 145 km/h. At 1/1000 s the ball moves 4 cm while the shutter is open, more than half its diameter, so it smears. At 1/2000 s it moves 2 cm. At 1/4000 s, 1 cm. A spinner at 80 to 90 km/h is doing roughly 22 to 25 m/s, so about half those figures. If you want the ball itself to look like a ball, 1/3200 or 1/4000 is where it starts to work.
You don't need that for everything. Batters and fielders are fine at 1/1000, and a bat swinging through the ball looks better to my eye with a little blur than with none. I would start at 1/2000 and go faster only when the light allows it and the ball is actually in the picture. If you'd rather show the swing as a blur on purpose, the post on motion blur versus freezing action has the shutter speeds for that.
Exposure in sun, cloud and under lights
In full sun, ISO 400, f/5.6 and 1/3200 is what the sunny 16 rule gives you, so you have plenty of speed in hand. Under an overcast sky, which is the more usual situation at club grounds in a lot of countries, ISO 800 at f/5.6 gets you 1/1600. Under floodlights the light is good by sports-ground standards and nowhere near daylight. Expect ISO 3200 to 6400 at f/4 or f/2.8 and about 1/1000.
White clothing in bright sun clips easily. Check the highlights on the playback screen early on, and if the whites are blown, take a stop off. Cricket whites are the one place where I would rather underexpose slightly and lift the shadows later.
On a hot day a long lens aimed across 60 metres of baking outfield picks up heat shimmer, and no setting fixes it. Morning and late afternoon are better.
Where you can stand
The sightscreen sits behind the bowler's arm, and the batter is looking straight at it. Anything moving in line with it gets complaints, and at a proper ground you will be moved on. A little off to one side, or square of the wicket, is where most people end up. Ask before you set up, whether that means the home club's captain, the umpires, or the media officer at a bigger match. At professional level you are given zones anyway.
Slightly off the line behind the bowler gets you the ball arriving at the batter and the shot coming back toward you. Square on gives you profile views of cuts, pulls and hooks, and the keeper standing up to a spinner. Whichever you choose, stay put once you've picked it. Walking about behind the bowler is the quickest way to annoy everyone.
Most pitches run roughly north to south. In the northern hemisphere, standing at the south end keeps the sun behind you for most of the day. South of the equator it is the other end.
Autofocus and burst
Pick a zone AF area on the batter and leave it there. Wide tracking jumps to fielders or the umpire. Eye detection can struggle with a helmet grille, so body or head detection tends to work better if your camera has it. A back button focus setup helps, because you can pre-focus on the batter and fire the moment the ball is bowled.
Fire three or four frames at contact rather than holding the button down. Cricket has a lot of dead time between deliveries, and at 20 frames a second you will fill a card in a few overs. The burst mode post covers the timing in more detail.
What to look for
The bowler at the point of release, the batter at contact and in the follow-through, the keeper going up for a catch, a fielder diving, and the moment after a wicket when the bowler turns to appeal. When a wicket falls everyone stops being tactical for a second or two and the faces are easy to photograph. The ball itself is mostly luck at these distances. I would photograph the people and treat a ball in the frame as a bonus.
If you only get one position for your first match, take square of the wicket, a lens long enough to put the batter at half the frame height, and 1/2000 s. That covers most of what is worth having.