Night Football Shooting-Need some help please

[debnbill526]

Hi Everyone. I just purchased a Canon T6i and have a Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM Lens. I have to shoot my son's football game this Friday night, which will be under stadium lights.  I'm by no means a photographer, just a mom who likes to take lots of pictures. I try to learn as I go along. I would really appreciate any advice on settings I should be using to get some decent photos. I will be on field taking photos but I am not quite sure about what settings I should be using on this camera.  Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.  

[debnbill526]

Update--that was a tough one. Pictures were not great, to say the least. I was working with pouring rain and wind that was coming sideways. I took your advice and put the camera on AV, auto ISO. Many of the pictures were blurry and dark. I used Lightroom to to lighten some of them up, but I was unable to touch up the blurry pictures. So, of the 500 or so pictures I took, I was able to maybe salvage 150 of them.  I tried to attach a few to this reply, but am getting an error that my file is too big. I wish I could share. 

[debnbill526]

If you have facebook, you can take a look at some of the shots i took: https://www.facebook.com/groups/573573310064321/

it may ask you to become a member, which I can approve-- 

[wq9nsc]

Deborah,

I looked at your photos and you got some keepers out of the group.  When you process them in DPP (or whatever you are using) you can choose to reduce the resolution of the created file.  Irfanview is a really easy to use free image viewer that has a handy save function where you can set the output file size limit and I use this a lot when I want to reduce a photo file size quickly for non-critical purposes.

I really think you are going to be far better off going with the aperture set wide open and set your shutter speed to a minimum of 1/500 and given the lighting you can probably go to 1/640 or 1/800  with the field lighting conditions. Going faster is better because otherwise you are going to get too much motion blur.  Let ISO float or restrict its range if it is going higher than your comfort zone with the camera.  I would also restrict your focus points to avoid the camera grabbing focus on the background or something else that you don't want.

The lighting was horrible at the field Friday night but at least it wasn't raining.  I kept the shutter set at 1/800 except for a few non-action shots.  The boys got a nice 26-8 road win including running back the opening kickoff and they are having a great time.

Shooting in the rain is miserable and I have done it a few times.  I have the Canon raincoats for my long tele primes and for the 70-200 but it makes using two bodies at once a real pain.  Hopefully this will be your one rain game for the season.

And on edit, with the F2.8 and 1/800 combination depending upon the place on the field a proper exposure occurred between ISO 6400 and ISO 16,000.  I hadn't been to this field before and in looking at the photos in post I could have safely locked ISO to 8,000 and corrected in post for RAW.

Rodger

[ebiggs1]

OK, yeah, those didn't come out the best.  Did you set the camera as I suggested?

"Set your Rebel T6i to Av mode. Use Raw file format, not jpg. Set your Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM Lens to AF. Fix the aperture to f4 in the T6i, maybe f5.6 if there is enough light.  The T6i will select the fastest SS possible to get  a proper exposure. The ISO needs to be quite high I will guess, so let's start with ISO 1600. If that works well try ISO 800, if not try 3200.  You can set the WB to average it doesn't matter with Raw as you will set it on post edit. Set the focus point in the T6i to just the center point.  Turn all the others off.  Use One Shot."

"I took your advice and put the camera on AV, auto ISO"  I would have preferred you fix the ISO to 1600 for starters and adjust is if needed.  Also did you use One Shot and just the center focus point?  You need to get these basic settings down first.  Don't try the advanced stuff until you gain more experience. I urge you to do this first and ignor all the other advice until you become more experienced. Get some good properly exposed and sharp photos first.  More action shots will come and you can switch to Ai-servo for example and other settings later but not now.  Keep it simple.

[ebiggs1]

"I really think you are going to be far better off going with the aperture set wide open and set your shutter speed to a minimum of 1/500 and given the lighting you can probably go to 1/640 or 1/800 ....  Let ISO float or restrict its range   ...."

OK this for instance, Rodger is accomplished and experienced, he knows how to make certain settings for his purpose but I still want you to avoid doing some of these or his settings.  At this point fix your ISO, don't use auto ISO.  Also let the camera select from the full range of shutter speeds.  When using Av this is the main most important part telling the camera to select the fastest SS it can for the conditions. Not letting the ISO float. You can see in his samples that the ISO went very high.

If you set your format to Raw as suggested, in LR you can export a jpg to any size you choose.  That will allow you to u/l to the forum easlily.

[ebiggs1]

If it is raining try this........

You do not need any fancy gear.  I used a similar set up during a photo shoot in a hurricane!

[ebiggs1]

You are probably tiring of seeing samples and examples but here is a couple that demonstrate you do n't need anything but the simplest settings to get nighttime football shots.  However, my main most thing is the marching band.

The light here is not totally gone but the stadium lights were on as it was darker than the shot shows.

In the second shot I did have to slow the SS way down as far as I could to get the fireworks. Below is one much later in the season and it was very dark.

[debnbill526]

Actually, I used the plastic from the monopod and it worked great!

[ebiggs1]

"...I used the plastic from the monopod and it worked great!"

??????  for what?