Son's basketball game

[dragonluvr]

At this point, I'm pleased to have even GOTTEN any...!!:shock: Lighting is just awful in there.

I used the smallest aperture I could: and it's posted on the bottom of the picture. I used the aperture priority on my G2. Post processing was to brighten the picture and sharpen. What would you have suggested that I could have done (settings) to get more clear/brighter/sharper pictures? I am still in the process of deciding which DSLR I'd like: would one of the 50mm 1.8 lens be a good choice?

One in Orange is my guy. He played an excellent game and made 5 shots for the team.

[dragonluvr]

just a note, on the above shot, I was at the far end of the court.....on this next picture, I moved down to the end where the action was......not super happy with the quality of the image, but at least I got some that I could SEE

[[email protected]]

That old G2 is somewhat problematic for indoor shots.

You should set your ISO to the maximum light sensitivity (ISO400), and set your aperture wide open (F2.0) and hope for the best!

A 50mm F1.8 lens could help out, or perhaps an F2.8 zoom.

You need a DSLR with a high ISO. Most of the DSLR's have a max ISO of ISO1600 and a few have a max iso of ISO3200.

When I'm indoors, I use a Canon 20D at ISO3200. I shoot wide open or close to it, somewhere between F1.4 and F4using a Canon 50mm F1.4 lens. My shutter speed is usually 1/250th. I shoot shutter priority.

You could probably get by with a 50mm F1.8 lens and a DSLR that has ISO1600. Set your shutter speed to 1/250th and hope for the best!

-- Terry

[Ripsnort]

Terry, when shooting with an Iso that high, do you have to remove the noise from the pic after? If so, what software would you recommend?

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I generally don't clean up the photos because they will be printed in the newspaper at 200dpi, so the noise won't be noticed.

My Canon 20D delivers fairly clean images at ISO1600 or ISO3200.

I haven't bothered to clean them up, but there is some shareware stuff out there you can use to clean up the noise.

My next adventure is to shoot sports in RAW mode, and then use RawShooter to process, clean them up after.

-- Terry

[Mark1616]

Ripsnort wrote:

Terry, when shooting with an Iso that high, do you have to remove the noise from the pic after? If so, what software would you recommend?

Hi Ripsnort,

I use Neat Image www.neatimage.comwhich does a good enough job and the home version is free.

Mark

[Ripsnort]

Thanks for the replies and link, guys!



Re:RAW format with sports: With my older Canon G6 the frames that I could shoot per second(which was already pathetic with the G6) was significantly hindered in RAW format, but it was nice to clean them up afterwards.

[JohnG]

Terry makes an excellent point. Your post processing really should be geared towards the purpose. For newspaper it's a waste of time to clean them up and you generally have a deadline you probably couldn't meet if you had to do a lot of processing. For my photos, the audience is parents/students printing - so the loss of detail from noise reduction is better than the noise itself. You'll also find that the noise is good as long as you don't have to make any levels / curves adjustments. At any ISO once you start doing those types of adjustments (or shadow recovery) you get more noise. At ISO 1600, the noise will be very noticable in a print. The key to noise reduction is to do the bare minimum necessary. Too much really looks bad and you get plastic looking people. And, you should see what over-applying noise reduction does to things like grass -not pretty!

Best advice with any PP is to keep untouched originals of your photos - that way you can always go back and apply new knowledge later (i.e. if you find you overapplied something and you learn a different technique you can start from scratch again).

[Ripsnort]

Sounds like good advice! Thanks JohnG.

[[email protected]]

Just an update (I'm hijacking somebody's thread!).

I'm starting to shoot all my sports RAW mode.

Even at 4-5 frames per second, I can get the shots, but it's a couple of seconds to write the RAW images to my CF card.

I'm using RAWSHOOTER tocreate 1mb files for the newspaper, as they don't want files much bigger than that.

Raw is definitely a little more work, but the quality and the control off the images is well worth it.

Grant you, I apply the same "tweak" to most of my photos ina batch job.

For a few key shots that have a good chance of being printed, I'm doing a little more "touching up".

I noticed the results in the paper this week and there is definite improvement, however I think I can better optomize images for newspaper print as time goes by.

-- Terry