There are certain sports where the fans sit on one side of a fence, and the action happens on another. The sports that come to my mind with this predicament include, but are not limited to, baseball, softball and of course all forms of motorsport.

So here you are sitting on the wrong side of the action, and all youre getting is nothing usable or nice. What do you do?

There is really only one way to solve this problem and it requires you to move around and know a little bit about how the camera works so that you can trick it into thinking there is nothing between you and the action.

For starters, try to understand how your camera sees the world. Take your finger and put your hand outstretched in front of you. Everything is more or less in focus. Now keeping your ‘focus’ on a distant object beyond your finger, bring your finger closer to your nose. As you do, you’ll notice that it continues to blur out and eventually almost disappear. Apply that same technique to the fence. The farther you are away from it, the more distracting and in focus those chain-links will be. So step one, move you and your camera right next to the fence.

Step two requires you know how to work your camera…a little bit. Push the aperture down as far as it will go. If you have an  f5.6 lens, then you may not get perfect results. Anything below that (f4-f1.4), you should be ok. In addition to shooting at lower apertures, try using the full focal length of the camera. The farther you have the lens zoomed in, the more out of focus things in the foreground will be.

What you have done is open the camera’s aperture as wide as it will go to blur the foreground objects even more than they normally would be AND moved closer to the fence. The photo below was taken with a fence between me and the players. Now go try it.