The best Canon cameras and lenses for sports photography

Sports photographers need robust, reliable camera equipment to ensure they never miss a beat. Fast, accurate autofocus and a high-speed drive are essential, as are intuitive fingertip controls that let you keep your eye on the action.

If you’re a professional sports photographer, it’s not just about capturing the moment – it’s also about delivering images and video to your client or picture desk quickly. The best sports cameras offer not only rapid, intelligent autofocus but also fast, stable connectivity for efficient file transfer under pressure.

So, which Canon cameras are best for sports photography? And what lenses do professional sports photographers recommend?

"For me, the essential lenses for sports are the RF 400mm F2.8L IS USM, the RF 70-200mm F2.8L IS USM and a short zoom," says Canon Ambassador Jorge Ferrari, who now shoots exclusively with Canon EOS R System mirrorless cameras and lenses. But, as the in-demand sports, action and commercial photographer also reveals, the best lens ultimately depends on what the objective is for a particular event. "Let's say I'm covering a rugby match, for example," Jorge continues. "I would put a 400mm or 600mm lens on my Canon EOS R3 because the tight action shots would be my main focus. But I'd switch to a 70-200mm or 24-70mm lens for the prize presentations, because my priority has changed.”

“We pride ourselves on how quickly we can move pictures,” he says. “One of the blue ribbon events that everyone gauges themselves against is the 100m final. We’re now able to take a picture, then transmit it, ftp it to a server, get it edited, captioned and delivered via our software to all our clients in less than 30 seconds. And that’s fast.”

Here, Jorge and Richard, together with Canon Europe Product Specialists John Maurice and Mike Burnhill, offer some recommendations and insights into the cameras and lenses that can raise your sports photography into a different league – whether you’re an established pro or a freelance sports photographer looking to break through in the industry.

• Best mirrorless camera for sports photography
• Best camera for creative sports photography
• Best hybrid camera for shooting sports photos and videos
• Best camera for sports videography
• Best mirrorless APS-C camera for sports photography
• Best Canon lenses for general sports photography
• Best wide-angle Canon lenses for sports photography
• Best Canon lens for pitch-side sports photography
• Best Canon super-telephoto lenses for sports photography
• Most versatile super-telephoto lens for sports photography
• Best entry-level sports lens
• EOS R System: Solving your sports photography workflow problems

The flagship professional camera in the EOS R System range sets a new benchmark for full frame mirrorless camera performance. The Canon EOS R1’s rapid RAW continuous shooting speed of up to 40fps with full AF/AE tracking is enabled by a 24.2MP back-illuminated stacked sensor and ultra-fast autofocus.

“This is basically the next generation of sensor technology, which allows much faster readouts of data than our previous cameras,” explains Mike.

“It has many benefits, one of which is a reduced rolling shutter effect, so you get less distortion on fast-moving objects. Swinging golf clubs appear straighter, for example. Without the faster readout, tennis balls and baseballs can distort into egg shapes when they’re travelling at speed, and even a football can end up looking more like a rugby ball.”

Register People Priority brings added convenience – allowing you to save up to 10 sets of 10 faces for the camera to recognise in a scene. It’s ideal for shots when there are multiple players on a pitch and you need to isolate one person, or when a crowd is close to the subject, Richard enthuses. Golf is a good example, he says: "You have banks of crowds behind the golfer, who is often wearing a baseball cap and putting their head down. Old-school face detection would jump to any face it thought was the right person, but Register People Priority just grabs and holds. It gives you the ability to be more creative because you can trust the camera to do its job."

Object-tracking is also next level with the option to detect and track racing cars and motorbikes as priority, and there’s Flexible Zone AF where the AF area size and shape can be customised – for instance you might opt for a block running horizontally across the frame to capture the winner of a sprint race whichever lane they were in.

Another standout feature of the EOS R1 is its completely silent operation when powering through 40 frames per second. "Silence is extraordinarily important in quite a few sports, including golf, tennis and snooker, and particularly helpful whenever there’s live television coverage," Richard explains. "It’s allowed us to gain better access and get pictures that we would have struggled to capture before."

The powerful in-camera Upscaling feature uses Deep Learning to enlarge images up to 4x their original resolution while preserving bokeh and out-of-focus areas. It's a shot-saver if you've captured a critical moment at the other end of the pitch and need to crop hard to get the right framing.

A Custom Continuous shooting speed option lets you tailor the drive mode to the sport you’re capturing – anywhere from 1fps to 40fps. Enable the EOS R1’s Pre-Continuous shooting, and you can record up to 20 frames (or any custom number of frames up to 20) before the shutter button is fully pressed, helping to ensure you never miss the decisive moment. "I've tested it using a low frames per second, half-pressing the shutter while a player scored a goal, and only fully pressing the shutter when they started running towards me. It got everything – from the player kicking the ball, to scoring the goal."

"Professional sports photographers rely on the EOS R1 for filing purposes," explains John. "The camera is designed to help photographers achieve perfection in terms of capturing the action and then get images with a small file size to a destination quickly. The EOS R5 Mark II provides something different, though. It’s more portable, and the 45MP sensor gives you greater cropping potential and the ability to display work at very high resolution."

Autofocus is quicker and more versatile than ever in a Canon 5-Series camera. Like the EOS R1, the EOS R5 Mark II features Action Priority mode for intelligently detecting the action in football, basketball and volleyball. It also includes Eye Control AF, allowing you to select a focus point simply by looking at it.

"It’s almost impossible to see any of the rolling shutter distortion that you typically get when shooting fast subjects," adds Mike. "So you’re getting a high-resolution camera with low rolling shutter and a fast frame rate. If you’re an all-round photographer who does sports, the EOS R5 Mark II is a dream camera because it can do almost everything."

It’s also a relatively lightweight option to carry alongside an EOS R1 as a creative body. "As a sports photographer, you end up walking around with a lot of gear, but you still want to be as light as possible," Richard says. The EOS R5 Mark II’s menu system is almost identical to the EOS R1’s, making it easy to switch between the two.

When its electronic shutter is in full flow, the EOS R6 Mark II can hit a remarkable 40fps, and it also boasts a 30fps RAW Burst mode with pre-burst, enabling the camera to start recording sporting action up to 0.5 seconds before you press the shutter button.

It is one of the best cameras for sports video too, capable of shooting high-quality oversampled 4K 60p footage across the full width of the sensor. A combination of IBIS, optical IS and Movie Digital IS delivers exceptionally smooth handheld footage, making professional results easy to achieve.

“The camera includes a full cinema camera interface and allows you to switch between video and high-resolution photo instantly, with a flick of a switch,” says John. “It offers 8K recording, slow-motion video up to 120fps and has a dedicated internal fan so that you can record for long durations – perfect for sports where the action is drawn out.”

As DoP Keith Ladzinski enthused while on an adventure sports shoot in Utah to test the EOS R5 C, the camera’s compact size makes it easier to work with in remote or challenging locations. Being able to shoot high-quality 45MP stills alongside 8K video means there’s no requirement to carry multiple setups.

The EOS R7's 32.5MP APS-C sensor offers a superb balance of resolution, low-light performance and speed. In fact, it's capable of 30fps bursts with its silent electronic shutter and up to 15fps using the mechanical shutter – fast enough to capture split-second moments during demanding action sequences. Pre-recording in RAW burst mode is also made possible by the EOS R7. This means that the camera can record data for up to approximately 15 shots (0.5 seconds) before the shutter button is fully pressed.

"For a football photographer, the moment the players run towards the touchline to celebrate is the money shot. That's why for every big lens you see, there's a 70-200mm hanging off the arm of any sports photographer.

"Sports photographers love the RF 70-200mm F2.8L IS USM Z in particular. It’s super-sharp and the small amount of rotation that the zoom ring required to go from near to far makes it easy to operate with a flick of your thumb. It’s also compatible with the Canon Power Zoom Adapter PZ-E2 / PZ-E2B, so it can be operated remotely via the Camera Connect app. Its sister lens, the Canon RF 24-105mm F2.8L IS USM Z is fast-becoming a popular lens for boxing photography too, where it gives you the ability to zoom in for a tighter shot than with a 24-70mm lens."

The RF 100-500mm F4.5-7.1 L IS USM packs a sport-friendly selection of focal lengths into a lightweight L-series zoom. On an APS-C camera such as the Canon EOS R7, the sensor crop gives you the same field of view as 160-800mm on a full-frame camera, and there aren’t many sports that you would be unable to cover with that setup.

The Canon RF 10-20mm F4L IS STM can create an amazing sense of scale when used in this way. It’s capable of capturing a huge 130° angle of view, but it features a more practical design and significant weight saving compared with the EF 11-24mm f/4L USM.

For more conventional wide-angle sports shots, look to the Canon RF 15-35mm F2.8L IS USM. It is one of the trinity of Canon professional RF zoom lenses, along with the RF 24-70mm F2.8L IS USM and RF 70-200mm F2.8L IS USM – three essential fast-aperture, high-performance RF zoom lenses covering ultra-wide, standard, and telephoto ranges. "They're the bread and butter choice for a lot of sports photography," adds Mike. "The RF 15-35mm F2.8L IS USM and RF 10-20mm F4L IS STM are perfect for creating a very different perspective, especially if you've got the camera positioned remotely at the back of a goal, for example.”

This is a lens that's well-suited to monopod and handheld shooting, as it sets new standards for lightweight design in its class. The Canon RF 400mm F2.8L IS USM offers up to 5.5 stops of optical stabilisation and it can also be combined with the Canon RF 1.4x and the RF 2x extenders to give you even more reach when you need it.

"I’ve always got the Canon RF 1.4x extender with me," says Richard. "It just gives you more options. A good example is football, when you're behind the goal and you want to get some shots of the manager and coaching staff on the sidelines. A 400mm frame could be a little loose and the pictures could be messy because there's a lot of stuff around those technical areas. But sticking on a 1.4x extender enables you to shoot tighter, cleaner bits and pieces."

When paired with the Canon EOS R1, the lens also benefits from the increased communication speed and bandwidth of the RF mount, delivering even faster focusing via the lens's Dual Power Focus Drive. In addition, next-generation Eye Control AF technology in the EOS R5 Mark II and EOS R1 enables you to select an AF point based on where your eye is looking – making focusing more intuitive when handling a super-telephoto lens.

Although they are more popular for wildlife photography, 600mm f/4 lenses are the perfect choice for many sports, says Mike. "Take rugby, where the try line and the big try area means that photographers have to be farther back than they are with football. And you can get those tight, frame-filling shots of golf and tennis. For skiing and winter sports, where the shooting distances tend to be greater – because obviously people are coming down a mountain – you’re more likely to see both the Canon RF 600mm F4L IS USM and the Canon RF 800m F5.6L IS USM being used.”

If you pair the Canon RF 600mm F4L IS USM lens with the EOS R1 you also gain even faster AF performance thanks to the RF mount's much greater communication speed and bandwidth between camera and lens. Plus, there’s a game-changing level of image stabilisation even when shooting handheld, when the long lens would usually exaggerate the effects of camera shake.

Richard has also used the lens mounted to a Canon Robotic Camera System CR-S700R – a remotely operated pan, tilt and zoom power head. “We use this head predominantly for athletics, installing it in roofs and anywhere that we are unable to have a photographer physically above a sport looking down.

“You get really cool, graphic images from those angles. Previously our lens options have been limited because of the size and weight we had to work with. The Canon RF 70-200mm F2.8L IS USM is a really good lens, but sometimes not long enough, whereas the RF 100-500mm F4.5-7.1 L IS USM can be too dark when you’re working under stadium lights. The RF 100-300mm F2.8L IS USM gives you a really good range of focal lengths for that kind of installation though, and because you’ve got f/2.8 it’s much faster to focus and gives you that shallow depth of field which really makes things pop and jump.”

Julian Finney, also a Getty Images sports photographer, was equally impressed by the versatility of the RF 100-300mm F2.8L IS USM on a shoot with the lens. "Photographers who shoot many different sports throughout the year have really got to think about what lenses they pick," he says. "This lens will be hugely useful in athletics."

AF is fast and quiet thanks to a Nano USM focusing, and there’s a customisable Lens Control Ring, which allows you to control one of your commonly used camera settings without having to take your eye from the viewfinder.

You can also use our lens selector to find the perfect match for you and your Canon EOS camera.

Professional Canon cameras for sport such as the EOS R1, EOS R5 Mark II and EOS R3 have been refined by the input of professional photographers to help transform their workflow. It’s not just the speed of autofocus acquisition and technology designed to make capturing the decisive moment easier that counts, it’s the lightning-fast turnaround of images that’s required for much professional sports photography.

The EOS R1 is the ultimate tool for transferring images securely, wherever you are: "It supports Wi-Fi 6E, and the Wi-Fi speed is double that of the EOS R3," says Mike. "It’s got more antennas than the previous cameras for a stronger signal, and the Ethernet has been increased to 2.5G – so it’s much easier to transmit photos and videos back to your client.

"We also have photography apps to help streamline workflows and send photos and video more reliably than ever. The Canon CTP (Content Transfer Professional) app lets you download the images to your smartphone, add voice memos or IPC templates, send video to one server and photos to another, and even have multiple streams so you can have images tagged to different servers if you want to. So it’s a real workflow application for sports and news photographers."