Going to opening night tomorrow (finally!) and want to snap a lot of good shots of the players at warm up and during the actual game.
What kind of settings should I use to get the best photos? I know you’d kind of have to see the lighting in the arena, but generally speaking, any suggestions?
I’m using Fuji Finepix s5100. I figure I could afford to put it up to 200 or 400 iso, and use the fastest shutter-speed setting I can get in the shutter-priority mode (which will assign the most appropriate aperture to the shutter speed I choose).
I think I may have to play with the battery-eating continuous focus to keep focus on the moving players.
I thought I’d try those, but I’d really appreciate any advice from people who have shot games in an NHL arena before with decent results.
Well, even 400 ISO may be too slow a film speed for decent indoor sports photography. Arena lighting is notoriously poor. Back in the day, when I would take b&w sports photos, I’d try to push the film to 800 or even 1600. I think you’re going to have trouble getting your shutter speeds up to where you can freeze motion (hopefully 1/500 – 1/1000 sec).
If your camera has any sort of a shutter lag, you’ll probably want to pre-focus, if possible. Or at least, pan the camera to follow the action.
In most camera, the more you zoom the lens, the less light you get hitting the sensor. The Fuji seems pretty good in that respect, ranging from 2.8 to 3.1. So even at full zoom, it has a reasonably fast lens. Still, if you’re at the borderline of acceptable shutter speed, you can try not zooming in as close.
Depending on how far away you’re sitting, instead of worrying about the autofocus, you’ll probably just set the focus at inifinity and leave it at that. That will take care of a lot of the shutter lag as well.
As for the settings, take some test shots at both ISOs and really zoom in on the previews. I can almost guarantee that 200 will be too slow for the fast action and that camera has a lot of noise at 400 (which is, of course, not uncommon). How large are the outputted photos going to be? If you are going to use them at the full 4 Mp, it may or may not be acceptable (people do expect sports photos to be grainy!), but if you’re going to shrink them down for online viewing and if you’re going to play around in post-, it likely won’t be a problem at all.
All things considered, I’d error on the side of having some grainy shots at 400 rather than risking all blurry ones at 200.
Check your ticket, you may not be able take photos or video during the game. This is true of major league baseball and football.
Not much to tell you other than max ISO and widest aperture, smallest number, and hope y ou get reasonable shutte speeds. Take a monopod as that is a good way of holding steady and panning so you can keep moving subjects sharp with a too-long shutter speed.
I think “video” is the taboo here. Maybe “flash” photography as well. I can’t remember ever being stopped from taking non-flash still photos at any sports event I’ve attended (and that’s quite a few).