night football photos

[jigger1]

I am new to Photography with a EOS camera i have had the point and shoot cameras. What I need help with is takeing photos at night football games. I have a Cannon Rebel T2i with two lens first on is a 55-250mm 1:4- 5.6 IS, next is a 100-400mm 4.5- 5.6 IS lens i have been shooting in Program AE mode @ 3200-6400 iso and seem to get more blurred pixs then i think I should get any help would be great. I will be trying to shoot in manual mode when i learn how. Thank you for any help you can give me Dave

[lputman]

You are limited on your equipment, most particularly the lenses. You have to take it off of the program mode and bump your ISO to 6400, try to go no slower than 1/250 on the shutter speed and the widest aperture you can shoot which is 5.6 if zoomed in on either of your lenses. If shooting night football games is something that you will be doing on a regular basis, you might consider investing in some faster glass.

[ElCapitan]

The good thing about shooting night games is that the lighting is going to pretty much identical no matter where shoot, though this may not always be true. Take a look at the field and see if the lightning looks good up and down the field. If you are shooting from behind the end zone, then and action near there wont be getting as much light, if any, unless there are lights right behind the end zone.

So if you are shooting along the sidelines, I would suggest shooting in full manual. Set your ISO to 6400 (yes your photos will be noisy, but it is better to have sharp and noisy photos than blurry ones). Since you want all your images to be as similar in lighting as possible, set your aperture to 5.6. If you don't do this, photos when you are zoomed out will be brighter than those shot at 5.6. Keep things identical by shooting at 5.6 so the lighting is the same whether you are zoomed out or in.You will have to experiment with your shutter speed to se what works best. Start with 1/250 and if it is too bright than you can speed it up.

As for shooting RAW or jpeg, that's up to you. A lot of sports photographers say they shoot jpeg because it doesn't fill up the buffer as fast, lets you shoot more continuous shots, and doesn't fill up the memory card as fast. However, most of these photographers have 2.8 fixed zoom lenses and are capable of getting a better exposure at lower ISO's. If you don't have the best lenses and have to shoot at higher ISO's and you need a faster shutter speed to freeze the action but the image gets darker, it is nice to have the RAW files to fix the exposure problem and help the noise in RAW. RAW is also nice when you do not know exactly what white balance to use. In jpeg you can always use a preset, it is always better to set the white balance yourself.