[Jim Bryant]

Let’s take a common horror scenario - shooting sports in dimly lit stadiums or gyms . Here’s a thought process to go through to improve your chances at getting good sports action pictures.

You may have already noticed that when you’re outside on a sunny day using the Sports/Action mode to take pictures of your child playing soccer or your pet catching a Frisbee, that you get these great action images that are worthy of submission to Sports Illustrated Magazine. But when you go inside and take photos of a basketball game with the same camera in the same “sports mode”, you get images that are only worthy of being erased before anyone else sees them.

The main ingredient that’s missing in the indoor photos is “light”. The light inside a gym during a basketball game is minimal just as it is during a football game or soccer game after the sun goes down. Most of your sports/action photographs will be taken in available light. Flash isn’t always allowed and there’s also an effective range of your built-in flash (10 to 15 feet) that isn’t conducive to taking action shots from the stands.

Taking a photograph of a moving subject without a flash under low light conditions can result in blurry pictures. The problem lies in the way that exposure works; the lower the light, the slower the shutter speed that the camera needs to make a correct exposure. The slower the shudder speed, the more chance that the picture will be “blurry” because of camera movement or subject movement.

There are only two things that you can do when you are trying to get a good exposure in low light: adjusting aperture/shutter speed or increasing the ISO.

• Use a very large aperture. This means that the lens is opened up to let as much light in as possible. The measurement of this is called an f-stop, and is listed with numbers like f/2.8 and f/5.6. The lower the number is, the more light gets in the camera (yea, it seems backwards at first). So, set your camera to the widest aperture, which will most likely be f/2.8 or f/5.6 depending on your lens.

• One way to get around the limitation of a camera lens is to increase the sensitivity of your electronic film (sensor) to light. The speed of your digital film (sensor’s sensitivity to light) can be adjusted through a menu setting. This menu setting is called the ISO speed. The higher you set the ISO speed, the more sensitive the sensor will be to light and the faster the shutter speed that you’ll be able to use under lower light conditions. There’s a trade off, however. When you increase the speed or sensitivity to light, you increase the chance for getting “digital noise” or a grainy look to your photos. The result is that the higher the speed or ISO number, the grainier your photo will appear. With most digital cameras, you can shoot at ISO speed 800 and below and you probably won’t see much digital noise. After ISO speed 800, the noise will probably increase and continue to increase as the ISO increases. Start with 400, and go up from there to 1600.

• If you have to shoot at the higher ISO speeds, you can reduce the amount of noise in your images through special noise reduction software. Some of the most common software is Noise Ninja and Neat Image.

• Lower the shutter speed. With a slower speed, you allow light to hit the sensor for a longer period of time. Longer time=brighter picture. The flipside to this, however, is that as the shutter gets slower, motion blur becomes more evident. Start around 1/60th of a second, and go down from there (perhaps to 1/20th or 1/15th). As you get into those slower speeds, you will need put your camera on a monopod.

That’s it. Those are the options at your disposal without having to use a flash. You can try any and all combination of them, and I recommend that you do so that you can understand the effect they have on the image. Shooting in low light is an issue for all photographers, and the good news is that every year new cameras emerge that provide better low light performance.

Here are some pictures of a state playoff soccer match taken in a rainy downpour. I started out using ISO 1600 and as the soon as the dark rain clouds disappeared, I changed the ISO settings to 800. Most of the shots were taken on manual at f2.8 with shutter speeds ranging from 2000th (in the rain) to 400th when darkness closed in.