Thank you! I set the setting as you suggested and the pictures are way better! I haven't taken under the field lighting yet but I'm hopeful it will be great. When taking picture on the field during the day should I keep the setting but change the ISO?
@Mmoitoso wrote:Thank you! I set the setting as you suggested and the pictures are way better! I haven't taken under the field lighting yet but I'm hopeful it will be great. When taking picture on the field during the day should I keep the setting but change the ISO?
Nice shot, once again! How well, or quickly, can you read the display data in the viewfinder?
That lens is going to be at f5.6 once you get into the 150mm zoom lens and that is a very narrow aperture for sports under lights. Once you drop the shutter speed too much, motion blur is an issue and 1/500 is definitely on the ragged edge for motion blur for many baseball photos. So once you have a fast enough shutter speed to freeze motion, the f5.6 lens with night sports is going to push the ISO up and noise is the result.
Some possible options:
1. If you aren't shooting in RAW, do so because you can do some reasonable cleanup after shooting in RAW. Canon's DPP processing software is free for Canon owners and it works quite well at de-noising RAW files and converting to jpg. Shooting in RAW isn't a magic fix but it will help.
2. Get as close as possible, mostly to avoid having to crop because this makes the noise and loss of detail of high ISO shots far more noticeable. If you can use your zoom lens at a lesser telephoto setting where a wider aperture is available, that will also help.
3. Consider getting some shots when the player is frozen. This will allow you to drop shutter speed allowing ISO to decrease.
4. If your children play/perform in more than one stadium, try to concentrate on sites that have the best lighting.
5. If games start before sundown, capture as many good images as possible while there is still some natural light to supplement field lighting.
6. Light isn't distributed evenly across the field so when possible, try to capture your children when they enter one of the brighter zones.
My personal bias is noise is preferable to motion blur so attempting to drop shutter speed below the minimum to freeze action isn't useful. But ISO 6400 on a lot of cameras is going to have a lot of noise and loss of detail.
If you are trying to capture night sports events in places that aren't illuminated like a NFL stadium or major D1 football field a faster (wider aperture) lens is the only viable path. If you can get close enough, a fairly low cost lens like the Canon EF 85 f1.8 is good for low light sports but the caveat is you have to be able to get very close to the action with an 85mm lens. I have used this lens for indoor soccer and as a close work football lens in really poorly lit stadiums and it does work well with very fast focus.
Good night sports photography is highly dependent upon wide aperture lenses and those are usually coupled with a camera that provides good high ISO performance. I recently took the photo below at a field that has extremely good lighting for a high school field and it is better than many college fields but even with an expensive 400mm f2.8 lens it still pushed the ISO up to 6400 at my desired 1/800 minimum shutter speed for football. This was captured with a camera that does extremely well at higher ISO but there is still a large loss in quality compared to what it provides at a lower ISO setting, captured with aperture fixed at f2.8, shutter at 1/800, and ISO allowed to float to provide for the proper standard exposure.
Bottom line, once the sun goes down there never seems to be as much light as you would like for sports 🙂
Rodger
