Naaman Forest vs. John Tyler

[sfgumbo]

Here are some photos of Naaman Forest vs. John Tyler on Friday night at HBJ Stadium in Garland. This is the 1st time that I have posted photos here so I will welcome suggestions.

[Comanche]

Hi Roger - and welcome. These are pretty good shots.

By looking at both the EXIF data and at the shots themselves, it looks like you began in late afternoon, and finished under lights. That's tough shooting under lights. To be honest, you can just turn off your flash as you are too far away for a normal shoe-mounted flash to do much good.

In your day shots, you have some blur from too slow a shutter speed. I notice you have your aperture set at f 4.5. If you use f 2.8 (which your night shots show you have a fast zoom lens) even in the day time, you will get better background out of focus and you can get at least 1/500 shutter speed to freeze motion. Just as a suggestion, you might always want to use f 2.8, then set your shutter speed to a minimum of 1/500 or faster.

I notice you are using ISO 1600 at night. yeah - pretty noisy, I know. But, you can use the H setting on your 20D to get 3200 ISO - - but you will also need a good program like Noise Ninja to clean up the noise. Using 3200 will allow you to shoot f 2.8 and (hopefully, depending on the stadium) keep a 1/500 shutter speed. You can get away with 1/350 for many shots.

Lets see some more!

[sfgumbo]

Thanks Doug for your suggestions. I have been using the flash to try to get a little fill light on the players. To be honest at some stadiums, especially at the freshmen and JV games, it is so dark that without flash I can only get 1/50 shutter speed at iso 3200. After experiencing that kind of shooting experience I started using the flash. I will start using the 2.8 f stop on all my shots at the next game. Thanks for your suggestions.

Roger