First Time HS Girls / Women's Soccer

Working the 5D3 w/o flash under lights.
Comments and advice for improvement are welcome.

1.

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Owen,

High school sports at night can be quite challenging. These captures are nice, very nice for the first try.

Next time, try to fine tune your exposure for the skin tones. Parts of the uniforms look burned out and skin over exposed. The white balance also needs work. Your whites have a pink tinge on my monitor. If you shot these in RAW instead of jpeg, you will have a lot of leeway to go back and adjust your post processing. When you get the exposure and white balance corrected in camera and post, your future images will be better.

Phil

What Phil said.....

I'll usually shoot night games in M. I'll position myself on a sideline, between the light poles. If you were to draw a line "vertically" through the center of the field- goal to goal for soccer- then the action on the closest half to you will be the best, and most consistently lit. Once play moves over that line, (away from your sideline) then the lights you are shooting under will start to quickly fade (inverse square law....). A similar thing will happen if you were to shoot from the endline. Once play approaches you and gets past the nearest light poles (usually about 25 yards from the goal) there is often no light on the player's faces. Look for action where the lights are best.

I have found the best way to control the exposure, as Phil noted, is to study the lights carefully.... To most players and fans- the whole field looks lit evenly. We have to know better. Once I am able to figure out the "sweet spots", I'll find an exposure manually that doesn't over expose the white team's jersey. It's usually a good bit under what the camera would meter. I suppose that could be done in one of the modes- AV, TV, whatever... but I've never had it give repeatable, consistent results that way.

White balance is a constant challenge. My experience is that the lights typically cycle through the color spectrum... so my 1/1000, or 1/500 of a second will have a mixture of dozens (guessing) of light bulbs, all at different points in the color cycle. Usually.... they average out nicely enough, but every so often, I'll get unlucky, I suppose, and get more of them on red or green at a given moment. I will usually shoot in raw, fix this later. No sense trying to set a custom white balance when it changes from shot to shot.

The good news is- you have captured good moments in your shots, and you have a nice enough combination of light and gear that you should be able to get the correct exposure. Fine tuning will make a great improvement in your results.

Thanks for the feedback!
I did find exposure to be a challenge.
I will have to switch to RAW and spend more time in post.

Maybe bring the exposures of the highlights Down a tad. Did you say which lens you used??

V4her wrote in post #15693706
Thanks for the feedback!
I did find exposure to be a challenge.
I will have to switch to RAW and spend more time in post.

This is an entirely different subject.... and I don't want to hijack your thread.... But after shooting RAW almost exclusively for a few years, I actually find that it takes me more time to process my JPGs. I import everything to LR, adjust the sliders individually for the first few shots, then apply settings to the whole batch. I'll then page through each file to adjust crop, tweak sliders, whatever. It's the same process for RAW or JPG... except the RAW sliders are calibrated in a way that makes more sense to me, and they are more effective. I don't see a time saving aspect to jpg, unless you are using the photos straight out of the camera- which doesn't happen for me with sports.

Just my perspective. Lots of folks will probably disagree. There are plenty of RAW v JPG threads where this battle rages.