Canon T3i, please help with night time soccer pictures

[BamaGirl]

Please help me with a setting for evening soccer pictures! We have a game tonight and all my pictures have been blurry or grainy.

[cicopo]

That's a very challenging gig. We have some discussions similar here.

http://forums.usa.canon.com/t5/General-Camera-Discussion/best-camera-for-low-light-and-sports/m-p/43...

And here

http://forums.usa.canon.com/t5/EOS/Night-Football-games-in-bad-light/m-p/43873#U43873

[Skirball]

As Cicopo said, it's challenging, you're pushing the limits of your camera (and maybe past it's limits depending on what lens you have).  This is one of those areas where people spend a lot of money to get good results.

The second link has some good advice on it.  I'd summarize by saying:

Shoot in Tv mode.  Try shooting as "slow" as 1/200 (maybe even a little under).  With good panning technique you may be able to mostly freeze the subject.  Their hands and feet will show movement, but personally I think it adds to the shot. 

Don't shoot zoomed all the way in if you don't have to.  At 1/200 if you were shooting at say 250mm your shots could be blurry just from camera movement.  Also, if you're using a zoom lens with a variable aperture it'll be wider on the short end, not much, but that little bit will help.  If you happen to have a prime, like a 50mm 1.8, use it if you can.  Obviously you can't cover the other end of the field, but you might get some nice shots on your side.

Shoot RAW and post process.  You can clean up some grain, and eek out that last bit of light.

GOod luck.

[TCampbell]

Action coming "toward" the camera will not require as fast of a shutter speed as action moving "sideways".  So while speeds such as 1/500th will generally freeze most action moving sideways, slower speeds often work when the action is headed your way.  

Scott Kelby has a video on shooting sports which is probably worth watching (it's nearly an hour long but you'll probably get a lot out of it.)  The video is here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ4KsGYDzgU

The pros are, of course, using very expensive glass... long focal length lenses with very low focal ratios so they actually gather quite a bit of light.)   Without long lenses, you may have to wait for the action to come to you to get the good shots because when the action is at the far end of the field from you, the subjects are going to be tiny.

You are going to have to push the ISO high.  That means ISO 3200-6400 range and as you get into those high ranges you get more image noise.  If you shoot JPEG (which is fine for sports because you better continuous shooting frame-rates due to the smaller size of JPEG images) the camera will clean up a lot of that noise for you (at the cost of softening the images somewhat).  If you shoot RAW, the camera will not clean up the noise and you have to do it on your computer.  Better to have a fast shutter speed at high ISO with noise... than a slow shutter speed with low ISO and blurry shots.  That's because you can clean up a lot of noise, but you can't do much about the blurry shots unless you're a really talented artist.

I clean up noise using a Photoshop plug-in (also available for Lightroom and Aperture) called Noiseware Pro by Imagenomic.  I was always underwhelmed by the built-in noise reduction of most software but Noiseware gives me a lot of control over how the noise is reduced and works extremely well.

Good luck!