Novice Trying Rugby Shots

[stewhite1985]

ive got a 350d with the standard 18-55mm and a 90-300mm canon lens aswell, i was at the rugby last Sunday and i was using the 300mm one, most of my shots came out slighty blurry, i had the camera set on Av mode and im not into changing many settings yet,

my main area of questioning is what should i be setting on the camera for action shots based around rugby,

also im interested in a IS lens, guy at work has the 70-300mm one which i had a go with and really like, is this a good move for me and sell my 90-300mm one.

Thanks In Advance
Stephen

[Zilly]

post some examples with exif it will help us no end

i suspect your shutter speed wasnt high enough

[thechickencow]

Yeah, probably need your shutter speed up there pretty high if you're shooting at 300mm. Try using shutter priority with a shutter speed higher than your focal length (higher than 300) if you're shooting hand held.

[donboyfisher]

irrespective of lens, to simply stop the motion of feet, arms and bodies of the players, you'll typically need to be shooting with a shutter speed of 1/300 or faster.

The next thing is to consider the length of lens you using and the shutter speed for that. The furhter you are zoomed in, the move sensitive the image will be to your hand movements. You get blur due not to the subjects moving ,but you moving the camera just by holding it ( Think of holding a laser pen ... tiny movements in you hand make the dot shake about a heck of a lot when its hitting a wall 20m away ... the same is true with the camera and the image ) . To counter this for hand held shots, as said above, you need to normally apply a rule of 1/focal length. In your case, you have a 300mm lens on a 1.6 crop factor body, the effective focal length is 480mm . . . so when your zoomed in fully, you need to be shooting at atleast 1/500.


In order for you to achieve that, the best thing to do is to set the camera to the Tv setting and then use the toothed wheel to change the shutter speed to 500. The shutter value should be shown in the top left corner of the display irrc on an XT.

The other thing to consider once you've done that is the ISO setting. You may find that on a dull day, when you try and take a shot, the camera will blink the aperture value at you when you look through the viewfinder. This means that it cant adjust the aperature to acheive what it thinks is a suitable exposure for the shot.

If this happens, the thing you should adjust to counter this is the ISO setting. Press the ISO button on the back and then choose a more suitable ISO value. The ISO specifies how sensitive the sensor is to the light that hits it. So if the camera cant think that it can expose properly due to a low ISO, when you up the ISO sensitivity, the camera can then better expose the picture. I've only touched the tip of the iceberg here ... its something that i'm sure you'll slowly learn as time goes on.

So if I've set 1/500 in Tv mode, what ISO should I use?

Well, you're in the UK like me. I'd typically apply the following as a general rule of thumb knowing what like the sky conditions are ( these are just guides as a place to start ).

Bright sunny Day: ISO 100 -> ISO200
Overcast, but still bright: ISO 200 -> ISO400
Dull overcast: ISO400 -> ISO 800 and above
Pishing with rain : Just ask yourself why you bother standing in the rain :)


Last thing: I would have the camera set on centre point only focussing ( and possibly AI SERVO mode. )

Centre point only focus means that the camera will concentrate on focussing on the whats at the middle dot of the viewfinder. That way you just have to plant that dot on the player and the camera will focus to that, and that alone ... this will help since you quite often get other players at the sides of a shot which could possibly steal the focus from what you hoped it would focus on. It removes the uncertainty.

AI SERVO will mean that even if you half-press the button and get a focus lock, it'll continue to track and keep focus on that lock if the player is moving towards or away from you. Whether you need this is upto you. If you're just pressing the button for one off shots, then you may not need it. If you half pressing the button and keeping tracking the player towards the try-line and then press the button just as he's going voer, then you would want to have this ON.


The manual will describe how to apply these settings.

[stewhite1985]

thank you very much donboy, ive printed what you typed and am planning to have a bit of a play over the weekend with different settings.

what is peoples views on the Canon 70-300mm IS lens?

[donboyfisher]

IS is something that you should read up upon. Going back to my point about you holding the camera and making it shake, IS serves to keep the image stable and counter that shake. What it doesn't do is make capture the subject any faster. If the subject is moving fast, then IS wont help you.

IS is useful if your shooting in low-light or if the subject is fairly slow moving ( think nature, people posing ) In your case for rugby, i'm not convinced that IS in general would particularly help.

So if you dont use IS, then how good is the lens? Well, its likely going to be better than what you have. The Lens section of this site has a sticky thread at the top of the section with links to galleries of all the common lenses, so you can get a ton of information there and other photo based sites.


I guess it also depends on how much this guy is going to be selling the lens for. On camerapricebuster.co.uk, the lens retails new at £369. At that price, I wouldn't buy it. For a little bit more saving, you can make the jump to one of Canon's L lenses ... the 70-200 f4 L. It can be had new for £409 . . . not really a lot more. That extra £40 buys you considerably better image quality than what you have or the 70-300 your looking at.

I bought the 70-200 f4 L recently second hand and have to admit that the difference all round is amazing. I was a little unsure of all these people saying that L-lenses are special, but they really are.

It focusses really fast, the colours are better, there is no purple fringing around black/white changes and all round the images are just that bit better.

I take mostly shots of horses ( but have toyed with the idea of going back to my old rugby club and taking a few pics ) , and when using the L, and looking at the photo, i can pick out individual hairs on the horse's mane, even at 200mm. I can now tell just looking back at old photos whether it was taken using the L or another lens.

The 70-200 range, whilst it may initially seem like your losing the 200 to 300 end of zoom, its actually a useful range for the likes of rugby pitch. Unless you zooming into get faces only, then the better images you get will allow you to crop the photos without losing details and things. I quite happily crop the images I take from the 70-200 and dont think twice about having lost detail that i could have got if i was using a longer zoom.

Reading back what i have typed, i sound like i'm preaching, but I guess its all down to what you can afford really, but I certainly dont regret saving up a bit longer for the 70-200.