I wanted to print this for her. I made a few adjustments in PSE, but couldn't figure out how to get rid of the noise. I can also recrop-original is below along with a few other fun ones. #1523973

You will probably get better technical advice from the other guys but I did notice a few things. You shot at 800 ISO which is OK but probably could have gone down to 400 (less noise) instead of reducing the EV as you show in your data. Also, why did you reduce your flash output?

By making those changes you would have been able to increase your shutter thus eliminating some motion blur.

On occasion, I will shoot with the fastest shutter speed the conditions will allow even if the image is a bit dark because that can always be helped somewhat in post processing. Too much and you would have to contend with noise reduction also.

By the way, I prefer the original crop because it shows the opening the skater was breaking through and is a better story than just surging around. #10653728

The other thing is to shoot at the high end of the curve. That is make sure that the shot is almost overexposed rather than in the center of the histogram. More data is collected at this upper end and reducing the shot back to the middle range in post processing will hide a lot of noise at the dark end. Of course a fast lens and a sensor that is as noise free as possible help too. #10654045

Lots to say here. It will take a couple of posts...

Dale's computations, taken stepwise...
-- reducing to ISO 400 [keeping aperture and ISO constant] would have doubled your shutter speed to 1/60th of a second
-- then removing the -1 EV exposure compensation (at least on my Canon cameras) would have doubled the shutter speed again to 1/30th of a second [again keeping aperture and ISO constant]. Note: I suppose it is possible that Nikon and Canon use reversed nomenclatures for exposure compensation in which case Dale's suggestion would managed to maintain the shutter speed...I've never looked into it but I've also never seen it referenced in the literature.

Jeff's comments: he described some aperture/DOF flexibility based on an assumed working distance from your subject (20 ft). From what I can tell, Jeff grossly underestimated your working distance. I used my crop-sensor NEX camera with a zoom set to 70mm to estimate how far away from a subject I had to be to get the approximate vertical dimension of a doorway in my field of view. By my estimates, that would have been nearly 50 ft. Sometimes focusing distance is recorded in the EXIF data. You might want to see if you can verify that. It is important to the next point. However, for Jeff's purposes, I think he is correct that you could have shot at f/2.8 (presuming your lens supports that) and had acceptable DOF. As he implied that would have have allowed you to reduce your ISO down by a factor of about 1.5x to reduce degradation due to noise, and still retained your f7.1 and 1/125 shutter speed, and/or been able to remove the -1EV that you had to deal with in post-processing. #10654123

But then the several comments about flash might need to be discounted -- yours, Dale's question about your reduced flash comment, and Jeff's implication of making up lost light due to fast shutter speeds using flash. Unless you have a really powerful flash, you are too far away for the flash to help you much. I will concede that I'm not experienced in flash and sports photography, but I seriously doubt that typical flash units have a 50 ft effective range. I'd be happy for Jeff to set me straight on that score.

Looking at your picture, it doesn't appear to me that the flash helped much, if at all. There isn't much light fall-off as you move away from the closest subject and the background is as light as the foreground. But as you mentioned, we don't know if that was because you were out of range or if you had flash compensation set down.

If you think you are going to be in this indoor sports photography situation very often, then my summary of everyone's recommendations above:
-- familiarize yourself with Jeff's DOF vs working distance numbers so that you get the most leverage using large apertures
-- familiarize yourself with your flash's guide number and what that means in terms of effective flash range. Flash effective range can vary with your focal length on a zoom lens, and in terms of telephoto focal lengths possibly increase the flash's effective range
-- Also know what your camera's fastest and default sync speed is. My guess is that your camera might have set itself to 1/125 second as a default flash sync value, and f/7.1 was the camera meter's decision based on your ISO and EV value.
-- avoid using exposure compensation (i.e., +/- EV) as a way to manage shutter speed. ( Again, my guess is that if you actually intentionally set the -1 EV, it was an attempt to keep your shutter speed acceptably high for action shots; or possibly to get the camera to actually take the picture.) As Mike pointed out, and Dale implied, if you can get enough light to over expose a little then noise is [supposed to be] a minor problem; but having to pump up brightness in post-processing risks introducing more noise than exposing properly in the first place.
-- acquire a post-processing capability to deal with noise. (Ex: ACR, or one of the 3rd partly noise filters like NIK Define)

BUT AFTER all that...I honestly don't see any noise in your posted picture. I'm presuming you saw it in your desired print size.

#10654126

I think by the end of my comment, I'd have gone without the flash. #10655063

I ended up decreasing my flash output because parts of the girls were getting overexposed, and at the time, I thought it would be easier to fix an underexposed image, than one with parts that were blown out. The girls were about 20-30 feet from us when I used the flash, and the flash definitely reached them. You can look at "derby 2" which used no flash. They were much further away from us.

Oh, and I originally used my flash with a diffuser on it, but none of the light reached the girls. I had to bend the flash head so it was lighting the girls directly, which worked best, but got a little red eye in some of the pictures I took.

I am taking a class on May 1 about using flash, so I hope to learn some more. I am having such a hard time with this. It really shouldn't be this difficult, right?

Here's my picture with the original crop, I've included the girls on the left, but this puts my main subject in the middle. Any other ideas to improve the placement of my main subject?

Thanks for the detailed input! #10655125