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Burning River Roller Girls
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Elaine Hessler |
I spent the evening at the roller derby and boy was this a tricky shoot!!! Poor lighting and fast girls do NOT go together. I shot for about 4 hours and got few good ones. The girl on the far left is one of my amazing students (Cornell grad in English lit). 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.
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Elaine Hessler |
Oh, by the way, any tips on photographing in these arenas would be appreciated. Jeff, I remember your basketball picture-it was great. How did you get such a sharp clear picture under those lighting conditions? Or is this a matter of quality of camera sensor? Here we go again...
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Dale Hardin |
Exciting stuff Elaine. I have a half sister that used to play the game. 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.
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Jeff E Jensen |
It's always an eye opener on how tough these kinds of events can be to shoot. Even though it appears to be plenty bright, it is usually deceiving. The big question is how much ISO can your camera handle before the noise is unbearable. In this case, I would have done the opposite of Dale's suggestion. I'd have removed the EV adjustment and bumped your shutter speed up to the quickest you could get while using your flash. You are dealing with quick action, so you need the fastest shutter possible. Also, you shot this at f/7.1, I'm assuming for some depth? Well, here's the deal, if you were 20 feet from your subject (pure guess), with your settings and camera, you have a total of 7.2 feet of depth from the front to the back of your DOF range. Way more than you really need. Assuming you can get to f/2.8, with everything else the same, you still get about 2.3 feet of depth to work with. The big advantage is that you end up being able to use a faster shutter and lower ISO. Yes, you will have more that is out of focus, but as long as you nail focus on your main subject (tough with fast moving subjects), your image will work. Make sense?
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Dale Hardin |
A bit confused Jeff. I was also suggesting she not reduce the EV and to increase he shutter speed. Opposite? :o)
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Jeff E Jensen |
I was thinking of your suggestion of going to ISO 400.
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Kristin Duff |
Thanks for the lesson Jeff and Dale! And Elaine -I too prefer the first photo and the motion of her feet just starting the skate stride!
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Beth Spencer |
This does look like it would have been difficult to shoot. I like the cropped one, seems a little closer to the action. Thanks Dale and Jeff because I would have no idea how to answer the question.
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- Michael Kelly Contact Michael Kelly Michael Kelly's Gallery |
Bad lighting a fast motion are tough for anyone. In Derby three it looks like you were panning with the action. Besides what Dale and Jeff mentioned this is a great way to make a good capture under these conditions. In fact I might have lowered the ISO and the shutter speed with a pan to further blur the BG and reduce noise potential. 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.
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Stephen Shoff |
PART ONE
Dale's computations, taken stepwise... 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.
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Stephen Shoff |
PART TWO 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: 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.
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Jeff E Jensen |
I love it when Stephen gets all techy. . . I think by the end of my comment, I'd have gone without the flash.
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Elaine Hessler |
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!
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