Some indoor gymnastics; help wanted please.

Well I finally got to use the new lens today, an 85 f/1.8. I love the lens because it's fast, good colors and smooth bokeh as well the AF is pretty quick too.

I need to improve my technique though. The biggest thing I notice are most of the images are flat, the histogram shows colors clipped on both ends and the tonal range is low.

I shot these at ISO800 and realize how important it is to nail the exposure right on to avoid noise. However, without a flash, this is difficult as the exposure is all over the place depending on background and location of overhead lights. It seems the lack of fill flash is difficult to overcome without overexposing the rest of the image. Another thing I find difficult is setting the WB correctly, I did so in the RAW conversion but much of the white wall is grey and white depending on proximity to the overhead lights. Anyway to avoid this?

In any event here are a few from today. I have seen some really great indoor sport photographers and would love to have some constructive critisism. These are the best of today but feel they could be improved.

Thanks in advance.

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Some of your problems can be corrected in post processing.

This was quick and dirty, but some improvement in the athlete was made.

Brice

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And this.

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First off nice shots...very nice bokeh with that lens I agree.

Ok second impressions.

The first shot Crop..crop...crop.

Eliminate the girls along the floor with the trophies as much as you can along with the little girl off to the right.

If you have Photoshop you can copy the color of the A/C or Heating duct and eliminate the woman that is standing there also. Or copy the white wall and eliminate it all together. But that requires alittle post production also.

I do like what bwolford did with brightening up her flesh tones. Thats what I would of done also.

The other thing is when someone is on the beam try and shoot down it when they jump if you can. Plus get a little lower. This is one sport where you have so many people up in the air. You can make them look like they are flying (which most of them are for a period of time) and it gets even more stunning results.

As far as white balance goes. Take a coffee filter and rubberband it over your lens. Shoot at what area your going to be focusing on. Read up in your manual about if you have the feature of Custom White balance in your camera. Choose that feature and it will meter for that. This is the cheap way of how you get the same results with an Expodisc, (about $75-100) cheaper.

That's my 2 cents worthless....

Try using a custom white balance setting ( taking a picture of white paper under the light your shooting in and set white balance to that picture. ) then things might look more normal. You want to get the lowest ISO ( 100-200 ) possible with the highest shutter speed possible ( 1/350 and above ) Achieve this by adjusting the F stop as wide open as you can stand ( 2.0-2.8 ) Adjust your RAW images before converting. When I did competiton cheerleading, I would set the camera to M mode and PP. I hope this helps...........Sam

M is a good bet, since most of the action should be well within the area covered by the main lights. shoot wide open, and iso 1600. if possible, try to overexpose by 2/3rd stop. you'll see that by doing that, you'll get less noise than even shooting iso 800. make sure that you shoot raw though. and don't do much other than crop if you intend to keep the photo, at least that's my point of view coming from newspaper photography (no way in hell would you EVER modify a photo outside of what you can do in raw processing/levels/shar​pening