Nighttime outdoor sports photography question?
I have an Olympus SP-600 UZ digital camera, and am having difficulty taking action photos at night under stadium lighting. I’ve tried increasing the ISO but get a lot of graininess. Please advise as to the settings I should be using. Thank you!
Unfortunately there is not a whole lot you can do. You will have to jack up the ISO. This is going to increase the noise or graininess. The only other advice I can give you is to use the largest aperture you can (smallest F#). This will allow in the most light.
There is a reason why sports are shot with very large expensive lenses. It is simply too dark for most cameras and lenses.
Unfortunately there is not a whole lot you can do. You will have to jack up the ISO. This is going to increase the noise or graininess. The only other advice I can give you is to use the largest aperture you can (smallest F#). This will allow in the most light.
There is a reason why sports are shot with very large expensive lenses. It is simply too dark for most cameras and lenses.
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Nighttime sports is extremely challenging.
At the professional level, there is excellent lighting as the games are often televised. At high school or most colleges, though, it is a struggle.
The best results are archived from a camera that provides good images at high ISOs (at least 1600) and fast lenses (F2.8 preferred). Even at that you may find you may not be getting the shutter speeds you want.
The other thing you can do is to mitigate the problem through software. Something like Photoshop will let you add a stop or so of exposure when you are shooting RAW, and it looks pretty good. Lightroom will do the same and has the advantage that V3 has built in noise reduction so you can help those noisy images, too.
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