taking pictures at night???

few months ago i bought an eos xti camera. son is playing sports and i have wanted a good camera for quite awhile for quality pictures. i love this camera and still learning all the bells and whistles on it. the problem is in taking pictures at night, they come out very blurry! when my sons football games were during the day, i got some great pictures. but the last couple of games were in the evening and these pictures were horrible! i have the setting on night. i have looked thru the manual but have not just dug into it. anyone know what is going on or what i may be doing wrong? plan on taking some pics friday night and would like to get this straightened out before then. thanks in advance!

What kind of lens are you using?
You'll have to boost your ISO all the way up to ISO 1600. You'll get more noise but will have a faster shutter speed to freeze action.
You should also open up your aperture as large as it can go.
If you still aren't getting sufficient shutter speeds, use a flash. A flash will freeze action but has limited range. So you have to be fairly close to be able to use it.

You need to use lenses with a fast aperture like 2.8, rather than the (I'm guessing) 5.6 you have now.
Also, you need to boost the ISO to the highest it can go, which on your camera will make the pictures look pretty crappy, but at least you won't have motion blur.
The best sports photogs might use a 300mm 2.8 and a 1DMIII, which will cost abouts $10, 000.
You will have major trouble taking good night pics with the setup you have now, I'm sorry to say.

can inquire into which lens you are using? im guessing the kit?

The automatic settings (like the night setting) are just guesses at what the right combination of ISO (camera "film" speed), shutter speed (how long the lens is open) and aperture (how wide the lens opening is). In most cases in harsh conditions such as night shots involving moving targets such as kids playing sports, the guess is going to be flat out dead wrong. You're going to have to move to manual settings to get those shots. Get the book UNDERSTANDING EXPOSURE by Bryan Peterson and learn how these things work together with a dSLR to make the kind of shot you want possible.

In a nutshell, to get any good keeper rate with low light shooting like this, you need fast (wide aperture) lenses and shoot at high ISOs. Both are necessary, and the lenses will be expensive.

You can use a shoe-mounted flash if they are allowed and if you are close enough to the action it can help (although may irritate and mess with the players). But the key to keepers will be lenses that range from the 85 f/1.8 (great lens, not too expensive), a 70-200 f/2.8 zoom (great lens, more expensive) and other possible choices.

For further reading, check the threads listed at the bottom of this page, and I wish you the best!

First, welcome to POTN.

Next, there's a lot to learn and not much time, so I'll give you the highlights. When in one of the "icon" modes, or basic modes, the camera guesses what you want, and may guess very wrong. The "night" setting you refer to is probably optimized toward long exposures in low light, leading to the motion blur you're seeing.

Closer to what you want is the "running man" icon, which is a guess at what your might want for a sports shot -- higher shutter speed to reduce motion blur. Neither is really the best option, however, as you leave too much up to the camera to decide, and it can only guess at what you really want.

In either case, the basic modes are just the camera guessing at how to take the picture you want. It's limited in what it can do on its own. I think the basic modes are limited to ISO 400, while your camera is capable of ISO 1600. ISO 1600 will give you a shutter speed 4x as fast as ISO 400, doing a better job of reducing motion blur at night.

Your lens will also be a limiting factor, as you likely have what is commonly known as a "slow" lens. A slow lens is one with a relatively small maximum aperture, meaning it is capable of letting in less light than a "fast" lens (something with a maximum aperture of f/2.8 or better).

Taking pictures is a balance of ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. A faster shutter speed requires a larger aperture, and particularly at night, a faster ISO. To get a faster shutter speed, you'll need to have a higher ISO than the basic modes allow.

Move to one of the creative modes on your camera (AV, TV, or even P in a pinch), and set your ISO higher. For night football, you're likely to need at least 1/250th at an absolute minimum, with 1/500th or faster even better at stopping motion. Your equipment may not be capable of reaching those speeds depending on the amount of light available at night.

In AV mode, you control the camera aperture and the camera chooses a shutterspeed to match -- so set it to as small a number (which means as large an aperture) as your lens will allow and see what kind of shutter speeds you get.

In TV mode, you control the shutter speed and the camera chooses an aperture to match. Crank the ISO up to 1600 for night spots, set a shutter speed of 1/500th, if you can, and see if that works any better.

Others may suggest M, for manual, but at this point it doesn't sound to me like you have enough understanding of the relationship between ISO, shutter speed, and aperture to make that leap.

I know this is a ton of information, and quite likely sounds like a foreign language. The best I can say is to experiment, and get out of the basic modes so that you can begin to tell the camera what you want, and not rely on it trying to read your mind.

Good luck, have fun, and be prepared to make mistakes as you learn. Stick around here and you'll learn a lot.

A fast lens if what you need and a little experimentation to get use to the manual settingings and aperture priority.

If you are shooting with the 18~55mm and are happy with that length then I suggest lenses around that focal length.

50mm 1.4
85mm 1.8
100mm 2.8 Macro (slow AF but good glass.

70~200mm 2.8 siggy.

Those are all fairly cheap starting at $300 new.

If you cqan afford $1300~1600 I suggest the 70~200m 2.8 IS. It will be a superb choice.

Good luck.

Do not even consider spending more money on lenses until you have a better grasp on the relationship between ISO, shutter speed and aperture. There is no lens in the world that can choose better camera settings for you, and it's the settings that you need to be comfortable with before anything else.

Another thing I think should be clarified...

When the above posters are refering to "fast" lenses, they are not talking about shutter speed, but about the maximum aperture. Maximun aperture is the maximum size of the hole in the lens that lets light into the camera, denoted by an f-number. The smaller that lens number is, the more light will be let in and the faster your shutter speed can be. For example, an f/1.8 lens is faster than a f/2.8, and a f/2.8 is faster than a f/3.5 or f/5.6.

Ideally for what you want to do (take nighttime sports photos), you are going to want a lens with a large aperture, such as f/2.8.