carera set up help

[skatfish]

Good morning. I am a new member. I have 2 girls that are in a competition marching band in high school. I take tons of pictures of every event. Most are daytime. My problem is low light and fast movement. My camera is a Sony a230. I use 2 lens a 70-300 auto zoom and a 55-70 auto. The camera has an auto setting for sporting events that I almost always use, but when the light is low i switch to the low light setting, but lose the speed. Any ideas what setting in manual mode i should try?

[Rentham]

Your shutter speed will be dependent on two things: how fast does it need to be to freeze motion on a marching band and how fast does it need to be to account for your focal length. Rule of thumb is 1/focal-length. So if you're shooting at 250mm you'll want at least 1/250th of a second.

Your aperture will depend on how much depth of field you need for a given shot. You won't have too much wiggle room here since I'm assuming those lenses are variable aperture and at the telephoto ends you'll already be in the f/5.6 range or narrower.

At 1/250th and f/5.6 in lower light, you'll probably have to crank your ISO to get to the correct exposure. This is where you'll most likely bump into the limitations of your a230 in terms of having enough ISO headroom or getting an acceptable amount of noise.

[SwissJon]

Here's something for you to try.

Set your camera into S mode. Set the ISO to Automatic. Turn Image Stablisation ON.

Set the shutter speed to 1/125s or higher (1/250s or higher if you zoom all the way on your 70-300)

OK, now the camera will adjust the ISO and aperture to suit the speed you choose. If you have an ISO limiter, tell your camera to limit the ISO to 400.. Otherwise your photographs will start to get grainy.

[sk66]

Originally Posted by SwissJon

Here's something for you to try.

Set your camera into S mode. Set the ISO to Automatic. Turn Image Stablisation ON.

Set the shutter speed to 1/125s or higher (1/250s or higher if you zoom all the way on your 70-300)

OK, now the camera will adjust the ISO and aperture to suit the speed you choose. If you have an ISO limiter, tell your camera to limit the ISO to 400.. Otherwise your photographs will start to get grainy.

I prefer to set Aperture and let it swap SS and ISO. I can set a minimum SS limit on my camera.

For most cameras in Speed mode the camera will adjust ISO first, then adjust aperture in order to get the exposure (thus the need to set an ISO limit if possible). In Aperture mode the camera will usually adjust SS first and then ISO...I usually prefer this behavior.

Either way, keep an eye on what the camera is doing and change your set SS/Aperture to prevent too high an ISO/ too low a SS.