 BetterPhoto Member |
sports shots, at night Hello, I need help! I have an Olympus EVOLT 500, a great camera. I am unable to take football pictures when the kids are playing under stadium lights. It’s my nonprofit volunteer job and the main reason I bought the camera. Tomorrow we have our Super Bowl and I will ruin every picture I take. I have used the preprogrammed settings and they are just not working. I’m a cook, not a photographer; I don’t understand aperture and other settings, I’m very pleased when I get good shots, more so when I print the picture for the kid who made the touchdown, tackle, or sack…...
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Todd Bennett |
Shirley, Action/sports photography is difficult at best. Stadium lighting is horrible. Check out the thread below: http://www.betterphoto.com/forms/qnaDetail.php?threadID=30578 You can also search the site for more on sports photography.You can also read the following: http://photo.net/learn/sports/overview
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Haidar Abu Bakar |
Hi there. Taking sports shots requires some changes in your preprogrammed settings. Firstly the White balance need to be change to AUTO, then your ISO need to be higher like 800 or even 1600. Then change your exposure metering area to center-weighted or spot. This will get your exposures closer to what you want to acheive. Good luck.
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Mike Rubin |
I shoot high school sports for 2 schools and this may be too late to help you now, but for night football, I set my camera to M and use the following: Shutter 1/400 to stop action Aperture f/2.8 ISO 800 but depending on the lighting I adjust this higher so that I can leave the other settings alone. There are time that I will also use my flash for fill. Check to see if it's allowed. Remember that the lightning is poor to begin with and even worse in the end zones.
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robert G. Fately |
Shirley, the gist of what everyone is trying to tell you here is that the problem is that there just may not be enough light to get decent shots without different gear. Here's the scoop on the settings - 1) you want to set the camera to be as light-sensitive as possible. This is the ISO setting, and the higher numbers set the camera to be more sensitive - so you will likely need to set it to the highest possible (800? 1600? not sure with your camera offhand). Beware that the downside to this is "noise", which sort of looks like grain in the image, but that may be preferable to not getting anything usable at all. The aperture setting refers to the amount of light the lens allows in. Mike R mentioned to use 2.8, which would be ducky if your lens can actually do that. You see, the light-gathering power of a lens is measured by this "f-stop", and here the smaller the number, the more light the lens allows through. The "faster" (more light-gathering) a lens, the more expensive it will be. Some zoom lenses have a constant maximum aperture, but many (particularly the lower priced "kit" lenses that usually come with the basic camera) have a maximum aperture that gets smaller at longer focal lengths. So as you zoom to greater magnification, you reduce the amount of light that gets through to the sensor. Finally, the shutter speed - here, you need to keep a fast speed in order to freeze motion (otherwise everything will be a blur). Exactly how fast depends on the focal length you use; longer focal lengths (i.e. - more magnification) require faster speeds to avoid this blur. Mike R also makes the very sensible recommendation of going into manual exposure mode and setting the aperture and shutter one time, rather than relying on the internal meter. This is due to the contrasty lighting typical on an outdoor field - at one moment you'll have the stadium lights in the background and in the next instant you'll have a player with the dark sky behind him. In the former instance, the meter will compensate by reducing the light allowed through (shortening the shutter speed or reducing the f-stop) - and you may well get a silhouette of the player. In the latter, the camera will let more, perhaps too much, light through - giving you a very overexposed image of the player with a nicely exposed background. So the sad truth may be that you won't be able to get a lot of good shots without getting a faster lens, but at least you can try some of the listed techniques to see how much they help.
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