Switzerland Beat Colombia 4-3 on Penalties After 120 Scoreless Minutes. Here's How to Actually Shoot a Shootout.

Switzerland beat Colombia 4-3 on penalties after 120 minutes produced nothing — no goals, barely a shot on target in extra time — with Yann Sommer saving Colombia's fourth kick and Manuel Akanji converting the winner. A 0-0 scoreline through two full hours sounds like a nightmare for anyone trying to get compelling photos out of a match. The shootout that followed is the opposite problem: it's not that nothing happens, it's that everything happens in bursts so short and so spaced out that most people's normal shooting habits actively work against them.

Why "Always Be Shooting" Fails in a Shootout

Open play rewards constant readiness — you never know exactly when a chance is going to develop, so keeping the phone up and attentive throughout is the right baseline habit. A penalty shootout doesn't work like that at all. It's the most structured, most predictable sequence of action in the entire sport: one player, one ball, one goalkeeper, a run-up you can see coming from thirty yards away, and then a kick that resolves in well under a second.

The problem isn't unpredictability. It's dead time. Between kicks there's a walk back to the halfway line, a huddle, a captain talking to the next taker, a goalkeeper adjusting his gloves — twenty-plus seconds of essentially nothing, repeated ten or more times across a shootout that goes the distance. Treat that like open play and you either burn through storage shooting empty buildup, or worse, you relax during the dead time and miss the two seconds that actually matter because you weren't ready when they arrived.

The Fix: Treat Every Kick as Its Own Mini-Event

The single biggest mistake in shootout photography is raising the phone right as the player starts their run-up and lowering it right after the ball's struck. That window is too tight, and it cuts off the two things that actually make a shootout photo worth keeping: the goalkeeper's read (which starts before the strike, as they shift weight to guess a direction) and the reaction (which peaks a full second or two after the ball crosses the line, not at the moment it does).

The better approach is to raise the phone the second a player starts walking toward the spot — well before the run-up itself — and keep it up through the entire sequence: placement of the ball, the walk-back, the run-up, the strike, the keeper's dive, and the eruption or collapse that follows. That's a much longer hold than instinct suggests, and it's the only way to reliably catch Sommer's save on Colombia's fourth kick, which happened almost a full second before the Swiss bench reaction that made it obvious something big had just happened.

1. Raise the phone at the walk to the spot, not the run-up. The extra few seconds cost you nothing during a shootout's dead time and buy you the keeper's pre-kick body language.
2. Use video or continuous burst, not single frames. A shootout kick-to-reaction sequence is under two seconds total — there's no time to react and press the shutter at the right instant manually.
3. Don't lower the phone at the strike. The save or the goal is only half the moment; the reaction from both benches a beat later is the other half, and it's often the more interesting photo.
4. Reset fully between kicks. Each kick is an independent event with its own buildup and payoff — don't let fatigue from a long shootout cause you to shoot the eighth kick more casually than the first.

Video Beats Photos for This Specific Situation

For most of a match, photos win over video — smaller files, easier to pick a favorite, easier to share. A shootout inverts that. The value is in the sequence and timing, not a single frame, and reaction timing is exactly what still photography struggles to guess correctly under pressure. If your phone lets you shoot video and pull stills afterward, that's the more forgiving approach for a shootout specifically — you're not trying to predict the exact frame in real time, you're picking it after the fact from footage that already has it.

The tradeoff is file size. Eight to twelve kicks' worth of continuous video, each clip running 15-20 seconds once you account for the extended hold recommended above, adds up to a real amount of footage by the time the shootout ends. Optimage's video compressor handles getting that down to something shareable, free, in the browser, without you needing to trim anything down first.

Switzerland advances to face Argentina in the quarterfinal — a matchup between a team that just won on the finest possible margin and a team that came back from two goals down to survive their own Round of 16 match against Egypt.

Related reading:

• Argentina 3-1 Switzerland: Photographing an Extra-Time Long-Range Winner — Switzerland's quarterfinal opponent
• Argentina 3-2 Egypt: The Round of 16 Comeback Photo Guide — another knockout match decided by a late swing
• World Cup 2026 Round of 16 & Quarterfinal Photo Backup Guide — organizing photos across the knockout stage