UIL Football Championship Game Photos

[Lennie21]

Anyone have any thoughts or ideas on how to improve my skills?

[KenJulio]

Lennie - moving this to the Sports Showcase section.

[KenJulio]

First thought, increase your ISO and increase your shutter speed, as the first appear to be at ISO 400 and at 1/160th. That will help you freeze the action.

What lens were you using? 300mm/f2.8? 300mm/f4?

[Tom]

What Ken said. For football, you generally want your shutter speed 1/640th or 1/800th minimum. Low noise is nice, but doesn't do much when your photo isn't sharp.

Look at your framing. Try not to crop off ankles.

Shoot in manual, especially in stadium with constant light.

[Lennie21]

Thanks for the input folks......

What I'm hearing is it would be better to set my ISO to 1000 - 1600 and trade off digital noise for a much quicker shutter speed while still being able to shoot with a 2.8f so that I can have a tight depth of field.

[Tom]

Originally Posted by Lennie21

Thanks for the input folks......

What I'm hearing is it would be better to set my ISO to 1000 - 1600 and trade off digital noise for a much quicker shutter speed while still being able to shoot with a 2.8f so that I can have a tight depth of field.

Night in just about any football stadium in Texas will be 1/640 2.8 ISO 2500 or darker.

Also, learn to adjust white balance either before or after. If you don't know how to manually set WB, shoot in RAW so you can effectively adjust it later.

[arich]

from the EXIF I would guess he was using a 300 2.8 with a 1.4 extender on it. Drop the extender so you can get a larger aperture, increase that ISO (tough on the MkII, believe me I know), and get that shutter speed to at least 1/640.

[Lennie21]

Ken, Tom and Andrew......thanks for all your tips. I'll work on it going forward. I'm gonna head to the local HS to try my hand at Basketball and see what happens there....

Gotta love trial and error approach to shooting, but with digital, the development cost is pretty inexpensive.... :-)

[John Godwin]

What were you trying to accomplish by shooting with a negative exposure bias?

All of the photos are under exposed which introduces noise into the photos.