di-rebel at night (i need advice)

[venenoazteca]

hey!
everyone thank you for all the help ,im learning so much in this forum.
this is my question.
i took pictures last night from a group of friends,cause im a big fanatic of soccer and my team won last night arriba aguilassssss!
anyway when i took the pictures they come out blurry and way to dark ,then i put the flash and they come out to blurry ,so please help me im new at this photography hobbie but im loving it ,don't care if i stay with no money left lol
so if anyone knows what im doing wrong please let me know
love monica.

[mtndew]

what type of len are you using?
what settings are you using?
the more information that you give a better understanding of correcting the problem.

[vvizard]

Welcome to our fantastic hobby, and forum :) Your subject says it was during night. That means you will struggle to get fast shutter-times (which you need to freeze action). It's even harder as this is a quite fast sport, and freezing fast movement requires even faster shutter-speeds, which in turn requires even more light.. Kind of a f*cked up chicken/egg problem isn't it? ;) But don't panic, there are ways of doing this, and your Drebel is probably one of the best "weapons" that exist at this time for handling the problems.

Soccer-fields are large, which means you need good focal-lengths. You also need fast aperture, and unfortunately, making long lenses with fast aperture is not an easy task. They become bulky, and expensive. There are quite a few 70-200mm zooms available. Canon got three good ones, and Sigma got a good one. (others may have good ones to). First off is Canons two 70-200mm f2.8. One of them got IS, and that's what set them apart. Ideally you will get the IS-variant, but it's _REAL_ expensive. ~ $1700. The other is the NON-IS at ~ $1150. They also got a much smaller and cheaper variant with f4 instead of f2.8. It costs ~ $600, but doesn't ship with a tripod-collar, so if you need one, that'll cost you another $100+. The other variant is the Sigma-alternative. I own this myself, and love it. It's a 70-200mm f2.8 sturdy built, quick focus, with tripod-collar included. It costs ~ $750.

I don't know if you're familiar with aperture, but the smaller the f-number, the less light you'll need to expose the picture. So less is good for night-shooting. The side-effect of small aperture are larger and more expensive lenses. These 2.8-versions also got the added bonus that you can trow on a 1.4x or 2x teleconverter, to get a 280 or 400mm lens on the long-end, and still be able to use autofocus. The f4-variant can't autofocus with a 2x converter. (converters need to be bought for themself, and cost a couple hundred bucks, but gives great results).

But if you've just got your camera, you probably also just emptied your bank-account, and if that's a fact, there are other ways to get the required shutter-speeds, while your bank-account waits for "refreshments". ISO-vales. Bump up the ISO-value from 100 to 400-1600, and you respectively need twice or four times as little light for exposing. It will give you more noise in the pictures, but at least it might give you sharp pictures. Preferably, if it's really dark, you will most likely need both fast lenses, and high ISO-values. And IS if you can afford.

Except for real closerange shots, you can discard the builtin flash. If you got one of the 420EX or 550EX flashes, you can use it a lot longer, especially on high ISO-values. But it won't do any good if you're capturing action on the other side of the field. It simply won't reach that far, and it will severely underexpose the subjects which it doesn't reach.

With long lenses also comes another light-problem. You need faster shutter-speeds just to be able to hold the lens itself steady enough for a sharp shot (yeah, photography sure ain't easy :/) A rule of thumb is that you need 1/focal-length shutter-speeds. So a 200mm basically means you need around 1/200 shutter, just to be able to hold it steady. But once you manage that, you will also be able to freeze most soccer-action I think, cause 1/200 is quite fast, and soccer is (relatively) slow compared to many other sports..

Hope this helps a bit, and wasn't to discouraging ;)

[De Paula]

I have bad news for you.
This problem is known and it's very common.
The name of this is Underexposure.
Take a look in my thread:

Underexposure, Does it appears in the MK2 or 1D ?
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=31332

Regards,

[venenoazteca]

im new at all this so is taking me forever to figure out settings but i will try all that you guys taugh me today ,i really don't know much but ill keep going.
i need to learn to have some good quality pictures for my make-up and hair portfolio.
love monica :P

[robertwgross]

"venenoazteca",

The bad news is that you need to practice. Expecially trying to get sports shots at night, it can be very challenging without pretty expensive equipment.

The good news is that taking portrait shots in small indoors area is much easier to get good results. It will still take practice, but the demands on equipment are much easier.

Start by getting your friend to simply sit in a chair, and you shoot using your Digital Rebel (set on Green Box mode) with its flash popped up. Then, next chance you get, do the same thing, but borrow or rent a 420EX or 550EX flash. Even that will take some practice, but you will see broad new horizons opening up. Then mount the whole works on a tripod, and you will see, little by little, which of these tools will make your results better. Then you have to go practice a lot more. Read the owners manual again each time you do a major shoot. Little by little, it will sink in.

Remember, "Rome wasn't made in a day."

---Bob Gross---