 Danny E. Drake |
How to shoot basketball action I purchased a Canon EOS Rebel XTi for the main purpose of shooting good pictures inside of a gym during basketball games. I have not had much success. I have the EFS 18-55mm lens that came with it. I also purchased the Canon EF70-300mm F4-5.6 IS USM Telephoto Zoom Lens. I have tried the "full auto" and "sports" settings on the mode dial. This is not working. Almost all of the images are so blurry they cannot be used. I think I need to turn the dial to the creative mode but am not sure what to set the different settings at. I am also getting the idea by reading Q and A that I purchased the wrong lens. Can someone please advise.
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Todd Bennett |
Danny, do a search here for "action" or "sports" photography. This topic has been asked many tiimes here so there are a lot of answers already here. You can also look at this link: http://photo.net/learn/sports/overview
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Jon Close |
The lighting for indoor sports is generally not very bright. You need to set a high ISO and/or use lenses with wide maximum apertures (f/2.8 or f/2 or f/1.4). The full auto and sports modes, as well as the other icon modes use Auto ISO which is limited to ISO 100-400. Shoot instead in either P, Av, or Tv modes where you can manually set ISO to 800 or 1600. The EF 70-300 f/4-5.6 IS USM is a good sharp lens and well worth the price. Unless you are within a cost-free exchange period, I would keep it. While the IS feature will counter blur from handholding, it does not help to get faster shutter speeds to stop action. So turn up the ISO. You might also consider shooting in RAW and post-processing rather than just using JPG files straight from the camera. For wider maximum aperture to get faster shutter speeds involves other compromises. Such as heavier weight, giving up the focal range from 200-300mm, go without the IS feature, and/or pay more. The usual alternatives are:
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- Dennis Flanagan Contact Dennis Flanagan Dennis Flanagan's Gallery |
Danny, for shooting basketball indoors, I recommend you ignore all auto settings and shoot manual, or at a minumum, go shutter priority and shoot at 1/125th of a second or faster if light allows. Some have said 1/60th is fast enough for basketball, so that may be an option. What I do is go onto the court, or as close as possible and get a reflected light reading off the palm of my hand or a person making sure that the light hitting my hand or helper is the same intensity of the players. Then I stick to that shutter and apeture. Then the only thing you have to worry about is focus. Good luck
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Scott H. |
I just posted this, but will repost for you: I will give you the benefit of my experience. Where I live, we have a junior college, a high school, and a junior high school gym, with the lighting in each one progressively darker. To shoot in the junior college gym with a Nikon D200 (at ISO 3200), I need an 85mm f1.8 and/or a 50mm f1.8 lens. Shooting either lens at f1.8 gives me a shutter speed of about 1/500. (I shoot under the basket so I need as fast of a shutter speed as possible). The images are noisy but usable for prints of 8x10 or less. I think your camera only goes to ISO 1600. Here's the bottom-line: Buy yourself a 50mm f1.8 for around $100 new (or a 85mm f1.8 for $300 used), set your camera to ISO 1600, continuous focus, dynamic focusing, and set the lens aperture to f1.8. Then get as close as you can and shoot away. Good luck! (I posted one of my basketball pics in my gallery)
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Danny E. Drake |
Thanks for all of your great guidance about shooting basketball action. I was much more successful this evening but my RAW photos appear really noisy. What can I do to reduce the noise?
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- Dennis Flanagan Contact Dennis Flanagan Dennis Flanagan's Gallery |
What ISO are you using? I would never use higher than 400 personally. In post processing either Noise Ninja or NEAT do good jobs at removing noise.
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