Does anyone have some advice and/or tips on Night Football Photography?
A few of my clients want me to document their children DURING THE GAME. I am a natural light portrait photographer but would love to dip my toes in to sports action photography. On a small budget, I bought a Nikkor 55-200mm f/4-5.6G ED DX VR (with a weeks worth of practice with it) and set off to a game. The daylight shots of the action were great! But at dusk then night fall, I struggled! All my shoots were noisy, blurry and the white balance (no matter what settings I put it on) were horrible!
So the Q’s are:
What settings do I need to use?
ISO?
Shutter speed?
White Balance?
Do I need a speed light or will the stadium lights be fine?
Any other tips can anyone enlighten me with is greatly appreciated!
PS:
I shot in aperture priority and never use a flash. All these games are outdoors and scheduled from 2 hours before dusk and end about 1 hour after dusk.
PSS:
I shot RAW and I don’t use this lens for my portraits. I mainly use my Nikkor 50mm 1.4D for that! Thanks guys for the advice! Any other takers?
🙂
sorry to be the one to say it but you will struggle to get high quality shots with the 55-200mm 5.6 lens and would also think that natural light portraits will be a struggle too with that slow lens. ALL of the pros at the game will be using a minimum of a f4 lens but most will have a 2.8 or faster lens with about 400mm or longer. They will most likely be shooting a Nikon D3 with the ISO cranked to around 1600 or more. This is not a blight on your skill level because as you say, the daytime shots were great. You are going to have to drop about $6000 on a lens unfortunately but before that, try to hire a pro lens and try before you buy.
All the best.
The lights in the stadium should be enough depending on how close you are to the field. A flash will be useless unless you are literally on top of the players. The tough things to overcome will be the noise and the blur. The lens you mentioned is not particularly fast. Most sports photographers would be using an F2.8 lens. With your lens at F5.6 you will have to increase the ISO to get a shutter speed fast enough to stop action. Typically you will need a minimum shutter speed of 1/250th of a second preferably in the 1/500th range. In order to achieve this you will need to set your ISO pretty high thus introducing noise.
As far as the white balance goes you might want to shoot in RAW format. It is much easier to make any corrections in the raw conversion software. Try setting the camera to auto white balance and adjusting it later if needed.
References :
sorry to be the one to say it but you will struggle to get high quality shots with the 55-200mm 5.6 lens and would also think that natural light portraits will be a struggle too with that slow lens. ALL of the pros at the game will be using a minimum of a f4 lens but most will have a 2.8 or faster lens with about 400mm or longer. They will most likely be shooting a Nikon D3 with the ISO cranked to around 1600 or more. This is not a blight on your skill level because as you say, the daytime shots were great. You are going to have to drop about $6000 on a lens unfortunately but before that, try to hire a pro lens and try before you buy.
All the best.
References :