New to digital photography and need advice

[novteach]

I have 3 questions. I desperately need answers to all 3.

I am a teacher and I, and sometimes students, take pictures for a school yearbook and web photo gallery. We used to do this with a Canon PowerShot A480. We would never zoom and used all auto settings except we always turned the flash off. Then I would crop to save the subject. The quality held very well when cropping. However good indoor sports pictures were extremely rare. Mainly to get better indoor sports pictures I just bought the Nikon D3100 that came with AF-S DX Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR lens. I also bought a Nikkor AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 55-200mm f/4-5.6G IF-ED lens. I am doing as much reading and research as I can and plan on taking a photography class but need as much advice as I can get for now. With the Nikon D3100 we have used the auto and sports mode, auto focus, and zoomed as needed.


1. I have taken pictures with my Nikon D3100 in jpg and Raw modes. Regardless of which one I use, when I crop I lose a lot of quality compared to cropping with my Canon. I can take a picture of a small sign across the gym with the Canon (no zoom) and when I crop I can read the sign plainly. When I do this with the Nikon D3100, regardless of whether I don’t zoom at all or zoom fully, when I crop the sign is blurry. This same loss of quality happens on all pictures when I crop. What settings do I need to have to keep the quality when cropping?

2. Which setting is best for taking the best quality pictures, Raw, jpg, Raw + jpg?

3. Most importantly, which settings are the best for taking pictures of indoor basketball/volleyball pictures?

If it helps, many of the pictures we’ve taken are at Photo Gallery. Also, if I purchase another lens, what would be the best one for the indoor sports?

Thanks

[SwissJon]

Hi Teach

2. RAW offers the highest quality as it retains all the image data.. The JPG file loses data by compresing the file. If you want the highest quality shoot RAW. However, there are limitations, if your shooting syle is not good, and you're getting movement blur, you'll not be able to rescue it.

1. It would be helpful to see the photo as you mean.. It sounds like you're either getting movement blur or the picture isn't focussed properly, but without knowing what settings you had the camera on, and seeing the picture, it's impossible to say more than that. You need to provide us with what's called exif data. You can upload the ORIGINAL photo to this website and find out the information and post that on this link. How Can I View the EXIF Data of a Photograph?

3. That really depends on your ability with a camera. The best thing I can suggest without further information is that you switch the flash on.. This will help freeze your subjects. Show the photos that you're trying to get right and we can advise you better.

One thing to bear in mind is that you may not be able to get the kind of photos you're after as easily as you want. I shoot indoor sports fairly regularly, it's very difficult, and with just kit lenses and on camera flash, you might have even more difficultyies than I already do.

[Doug Sundseth]

Just a thought on the crop issue:

A P&S camera has a very short focal length and a correspondingly short hyperfocal distance. If you're used to being able to have a very deep depth of field when the lens is relatively wide open, that might be your problem.

With a larger sensor, your DoF is much more affected by aperture for a given field of view. When you are shooting action indoors in the typically sketchy light you'll usually want to shoot wide open. If you are focused on one subject and want to crop to another part of the frame, you'll often lose sharpness quickly.

Recommended settings:

Push the ISO as high as you dare. I'd start at ISO 3200 on that camera and adjust up or down as required by noise considerations (noisy will print well enough, but blurred won't).

Select aperture priority and open the lens all the way. You'll get a short DoF, which means that you'll need to frame your shots carefully, but experience will help.

This should give you a shutter speed that will freeze action.

Shoot RAW and apply noise reduction in post (Adobe Camera Raw/Lightroom does this quite well).