I just got a Nikon D40 with the 18-55/55-200 lenses. What settings should I use to stop indoor sports action?
I am a real novice. Only used a point and shoot before, so please don’t get too technical on me. I’m trying to shoot indoor volleyball. I bought the camera to eliminate the shutter lag, but now what?
You should find yourself using the 55-200mm lens more often than the 18-55mm. The 18-55 is useful for wide shots of the game and the crowd but will do little to bring in any action.
Since the lenses you have aren’t very fast (open the aperture as wide as possible) and the games are indoor you’ll either need to use a flash or a higher ISO (ISO 800+ should be adequate). Keep the shutter speed as fast as possible to minimize blur. The pop-up flash is nice but will not help you at a distance. I’d suggest buying a Speedlight or a cheap slave at the very least.
If you have no idea what I’ve just said, just use the sports scene mode and the camera should automate everything for you to the best of its ability.
I have the nikon d40 too, i just got it on saturday, when you say you want to stop action, you need to use the auto mode, alot with the flash, you typically can’t do this without the flash, unless you use the H1 iso setting, which really wouldn’t be good to use.
Regards,
Nathan.
References :
You should find yourself using the 55-200mm lens more often than the 18-55mm. The 18-55 is useful for wide shots of the game and the crowd but will do little to bring in any action.
Since the lenses you have aren’t very fast (open the aperture as wide as possible) and the games are indoor you’ll either need to use a flash or a higher ISO (ISO 800+ should be adequate). Keep the shutter speed as fast as possible to minimize blur. The pop-up flash is nice but will not help you at a distance. I’d suggest buying a Speedlight or a cheap slave at the very least.
If you have no idea what I’ve just said, just use the sports scene mode and the camera should automate everything for you to the best of its ability.
References :
If you are shooting indoors I guess you would want to use the maximum aperture (minimum f= number) on the lens to let in as much light as possible to prevent camera shake. What shutter speed you should use depends on how you would want the results to come out, i.e.: the sportsmen’s action frozen or blurred to give it a feel of movement? Depends on what you want.
You might also want to use a higher ISO setting, but stick with the minimum practicable ISO setting for want of less grainy images. If you want to use a higher shutter speeds indoors, like 1/125, 1/250, you will also want to adjust the ISO to read a higher value, but higher ISO results in more noise or grain in the images so be aware it is a trade off.
Change "White balance" to Tungsten/ incandescent or fluorescent setting (basically change the WB setting until the resulting colours look real).
Good luck!
References :
to stop the action you need to set the ISO as high as possible and then go to A on the top dial for apeture priortiy… you then would use the dial to select the lowest apeture number available… That will then force your camera to use the fastest shutter speed that it can and that is what you want for indoors with the kit lens.. Whether there is enough light to do this where you will be is beyond my knowledge since some places have better or worse lighting.
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