Shooting Sports Night Shots

[Hads]

I've been asked to take photos of my son's varsity soccer team throughout the season. The games are being played now under the lights.

I've been having a tough time getting photos of the players under the lights at night. All my shots are blurry. I am an beginner in digital photograpy. I tried different settings, but still could not get it right.

As I will be photographing other games, I would appreciate any advice that the forum could give. I've shut the flash off since the field is well lit. I'm just not sure of the camera settings I could try to handle the nighttime shooting under the lights, particularly since soccer is a fast moving game.

I've also been working with the telephoto lens under these conditions.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Hads

[dn7elson]

Night shots (low light shots) are compensated for in different ways depending upon how you have the camera setup to "choose" the shot conditions.

On Auto, the camera will adjust both the lens opening (aperture) and shutter speed to get an acceptable exposed image. The usual result is that the shutter speed is set too slow for "action" shots and you get blurring since the shutter is still open and recording as the action of the field continues.

You can set the shutter speed as a fixed value by using the Tv setting on the camera, but you will need to set it to 1/125 or 1/250 of a second to capture action without movement. At night, or low light settings you will likely not have enough light to properly expose the image in that short a period of time.

So, 1) you end up with using a powerful, external flash (internal flash is good for only about 15' from camera to image) that will likely become an annoyance to the players; 2) you can change the ISO setting from Auto or 50 to 400 to "increase the film speed" of the camera (also increasing background "noise" in the image); or 3) do a combination of these along with panning the image as you shoot.

With panning, you follow the moving object (in your example, the soccer players) down the field and as they continue to move, and you continue to smoothly follow them with the camera, you press the shutter and do not stop panning until the camera has completed taking the picture. This will take some practice, but might give you some of what you want.

[Hads]

Dale,
Just got back from a night game and tried your suggestion. My pictures are a lot better. Still grainy. I used ISO 400 with a f/125 stop. Tried different settings, but this worked best.

At least I don't get blur now. Unfortunately, at this game (it was away), I wasn't allowed on the sidelines to take pictures, so I had to take most from the stands. Used a telephoto lens also.

I think the pictures will be much better at the home games where I can be right on the sidelines and at least 30 feet closer to the action.

Thanks so much for the advice. I will continue to play with the settings.

John