Few NON-strobed basketball shots from Friday night ...

...good thing my kids don't see Sauk's strobed shots! This way, they still think the pics they see from the games I shoot are pretty good. And this is it ... not going to post anymore of my Neanderthal (sp?) shots until I can get permission to put strobes at the home gym!!!!

Here's a few from a gym @ ISO 2500, f/2.0 (85mm f/1.8) and 1/640.

1. Prescott doing his best LeBron James impression:

I'm surprised there's so much noise at ISO 2500... especially on their shins.

Nice action though, especially #1 and #4.

Dave- Trying to shoot BB in a dark gym is a challenge, but don't be so apologetic!. You're showing good action - why not try some PP to lose the chroma noise in the shadows? I've had good luck with Neat Image. You lose some sharpness, but you can adjust to trade off noise reduction vs. sharpness.

Although it might seem like going backwards, you might experiment going up to ISO 3200 and getting a bit more exposure. This will help reduce the shadow noise - assuming you are using noise reduction in post processing.

-Terry

Terry Healy wrote in post #9142014
Dave- Trying to shoot BB in a dark gym is a challenge, but don't be so apologetic!. You're showing good action - why not try some PP to lose the chroma noise in the shadows? I've had good luck with Neat Image. You lose some sharpness, but you can adjust to trade off noise reduction vs. sharpness.

Although it might seem like going backwards, you might experiment going up to ISO 3200 and getting a bit more exposure. This will help reduce the shadow noise - assuming you are using noise reduction in post processing.

-Terry

Good points. Lots of noise because many were underexposed at IS 2500. Facing facts, anything over ISO 400 on a 50D shows lots of noise.

I have Neat Image that works great. Maybe I'll run this batch through and see if it'll perform any magice on these. It's kind of a fine line reducing noise and not turning the kids into manequinnes! It's also ironic that my 30D (used last season) had WAY better noise control than the 50D.

And thanks for the kind words on the actual content of the images along with some helpful direction. Appreciated.

dave

clarence wrote in post #9141995
I'm surprised there's so much noise at ISO 2500... especially on their shins.

Nice action though, especially #1 and #4.

I used DPP to process and chose 15 on the NR meter! Any more seemed to turn everything to a blur. No noise, but lots of blur.

As mentioned in my response above, I underexposed to get faster shutter speed then upped the exposure in DPP. Probably caused more noise than shooting higher ISO. Learned a lesson, I think.

dave

Dave- I used a 30D last season and will agree that it's no champ at high ISO - and I had a few where I made mannequins. But something is not right with the 50D. I'll defer to the 50D folks, but that should run ISO 800-1600 with less noise than the 30D, just what I've seen on this forum.

-Terry

Terry Healy wrote in post #9144567
Dave- I used a 30D last season and will agree that it's no champ at high ISO - and I had a few where I made mannequins. But something is not right with the 50D. I'll defer to the 50D folks, but that should run ISO 800-1600 with less noise than the 30D, just what I've seen on this forum.

-Terry

Yes I have used ISO 1600 easily and ISO 3200 also cleans up nice in noise ninja. It is usually better to use a higher ISO than underexpose if possible. But with 1 stop underexposed Noise Ninja does a really nice job.

Maybe put the camera on a tripod, even in your house, and make some controlled tests incrementing ISO, and underexposing. If you are using Neat Image, it is critical to make a reference set of profiles for each ISO for your camera. And you can also often get better results using the Auto-profile for a given image rather than batching.