 ANDRAY STROUD |
Photographing Motion I have a Nikon SLR D40 and I took some pictures of kids playing basketball. On camera LCD screen, the pics look good, but when I look at the pictures on computer the details of the kids are blurred. Any suggestions?
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robert G. Fately |
The blur is due to the shutter speed you used being too slow to freeze the motion of the players. You couldn't see it on the small on-camera screen because that screen simply cannot show much detail. In order to get proper exposures with a faster shutter speed (where less light will get through the shutter) you need to either add more light (unlikely, since you'd need a really large bank of flashes to achieve that), let more light through the lens, or raise the sensitivity (ISO) of the imaging chip. The amount of light coming through the lens is defined by the f-stop - smaller numbers mean the aperture is wider open and allowing more light in. If your lens was set at f8, for instance, then you could set it to f5.6 or f4 or whatever and the greater amount of light getting through the lens would counter the fact that the shutter is allowing less. If you are using your lens at its maximum aperture, then you could get a different lens that is faster - but now we're talking money. The chip sensitivity is the other possibly approach - if you raise that then it will take less light to properly expose and so the camera can use a faster shutter speed. While higher ISO can lead to more noise (which looks a bit like grain) at least you might freeze the action. As an aside, you might want to set the camera to aperture-preferred mode so that you can manually set the lens wide open and let the meter adjust the shutter speed accordingly. At least this way you will get the maximum shutter speed possible.
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Steve Schmidt |
I have shot a lot of baskeball games since I have two boys that play high school ball. It has been trial and error but I have learned what works best for me is to get a fast lens (I shoot at about f 2.0 most of the time). Then my shutter speed is usually around 400/sed just to freeze the action. These tow combined settings forces me to set my ISO at 1600 or sometimes even 3200 if your camera allows. Yes you will get some digital noise but there are ways to get rid of that using a noise reduction program such as noise ninja or neat image. They do a great job and if you do that you can always sharpen the image by using the unsharp mask filter in photoshop. It might sound like a lot of work but the pictures do come out looking good. Another thing that is a must when shooting basketball games is to set you drive to maximum shots per second, I have a Canon 30D and I can get 5 frames per second and have a 2 gig memory card so I take a ton of pics during a game. One thing I ddn't mention is what your AF setting is, I leave mine on AF Servo and I keep my finger on the shutter release pressed half way down so my subject is always in focus. Good luck!
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