Games & Entertainment

I have a Nikon D80 with a 70-200 F2.8 lens and have trouble shooting action shots under the lights. Any help?

I am trying to shoot action shots of little league and most games are at night under the lights. I am using the sports setting on my D80 and bumping the iso up to 1600 with a Nikon 70-200 F2.8 VR lens and still can’t get action shots that aren’t blurry. Any help with settings would be very appreciated.

The shooting situation that you describe is definitely a difficult one. I’ll offer a few suggestions based on my experience- I’ve shot night-time High School football and baseball under all sorts of lighting.

Basically, you’ll have to use the “extremes” of your equipment to try and get some good pictures. I would try shooting in aperture priority (A mode on Nikon, I think?), shoot at f/2.8, ISO1600, and hope for the best in terms of shutter speed. In this case, the VR of the 70-200 will not really help you either, so you may consider turning it off as well. VR will primarily aid you when you’re shooting static, non-moving objects.

If your shutter speed is still too low, if it is allowed, you may want to consider using an external flash like the SB600 or SB800. I doubt your shutter speeds are very quick in the first place, so shooting with a flash may actually help your cause. You won’t be able to do bursts of shots, but it may help. The caveat behind this is that you would need to be relatively close to the field, because otherwise the flash will become too diffused to be of use.

Another option you might explore would be to try and rent or purchase a new lens, particularly a prime lens. Although not as flexible as zooms, a prime with a maximum aperture of around 1.8-2 may be Your Best bet. 90% of my low-light sports shooting indoors and out involves prime lenses. I would recommend looking at maybe the 85 f/1.8, 50 f/1.8 or f/1.4, etc. Check out the link in my sources below, it is a company I’ve rented lenses from before and have had a good experience.

With these prime lenses, you may be able to capture more light and get some faster shutter speeds. I would really suggest moving away from the sports mode, though. Something about letting the camera decide most of the exposure factors bothers me. Like I said before, try Aperture (A) mode, the maximum aperture possible, at ISO1600, and see how your shutter speeds turn out.

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How to Capture Action Shots

You always thought that your digital camera can’t take motion shots as the camera almost takes a second to capture an image and the action is missed. Thus you refrained from taking action shots and limited your digital camera to taking pictures at gathering and parties.

 

Good photos are always taken by fine photographers and not the camera itself. Though your camera has umpteen shortcomings, especially when it comes to capturing action shots, You Can still master a few techniques that will beg you to differ. Some common flaws that digital cameras inherit is the shutter lag, limited shutter speed, write (image saving) time of the camera.

 

The shutter lag is the time taken by the camera to capture a shot. Usually a film camera takes a photo instantaneously in milliseconds, but digital camera takes almost a second to take a photo. Fast moving action like speeding cars, cricket match or tennis game have continuous movement which is not possible to capture the right shot if the shutter lag is one second. Thus you need to give time for the camera to get prepared for the shot. You can press the shoot button halfway, this way it takes the required focus in place if it is on automated mode. Then you click all the way it captures the picture with a reduced shutter lag. This way you can get some good moving pictures.

 

All digital cameras, digital SLR cameras and camcorders have a shutter speed control. Some have higher shutter speeds like 1/8000 seconds while some have as low as 1/640. With a higher shutter speed you can easily take good action shots but with the lower ones it is a problem. With the higher ones you need to also look out for the digital noise levels in the shot, you can take a shot with several shutter speeds and select one which serves your purpose. With low shutter speed cameras you can still take good action stills by using the panning methodology. You need to follow the object you need to picture even after you have taken the shot. This will enable a sharp focus of the object with a blurred background giving an excellent picture.

 

Most digital cameras directly save photos onto the memory card which consumes lot of time. If your camera has a multi-shot capability you can take series of pictures and then your camera saves them together. If your camera takes long enough to store one picture it also takes times to shoot the next one and you may miss out on the action you want to freeze. Thus the nest time you look out for a camera and intent to shoot action stills look out for the shutter speed, shutter lag and write camera time.

 

About the Author

Pooja Lapasia is a well known writer and has penned on many articles i.e. latest canon digital camera, shopping malls vs local shops, sony digital camera, mobile revolution in India etc.