High School Football Pics

[sbarbian]

I am having a tough time figuring out my camera. I have a Canon 7d with a brand new Canon 70-200 f/2.8 L lens. For my daytime football, I usually set it at 2.8 AV and then 400 or 800 ISO. Night time I set 2.8 and no lower than 1/320 with a 2500 ISO. I've had a couple good weeks but last night, even my daytime (very overcast) pictures came out not perfectly clear. I have a friend who uses the same settings NIKON D300S, ISO 1000, Exposure 1/2500, Aperture 2.8. and they are crystal clear. Another photographer has a NIKON D7000 shooting 800 ISO, Exposure 1/500 and Aperture 5.0 and they are so clear. Another one uses NIKON D40, ISO 400, 1/640 and Aperture 5.6 and they are very clear. What am I doing wrong?

I've looked at all the settings which I'm not 100% sure about. Metering - Evaluative? The small setting on the lens 1.5m - infinity or 3m - infinity? Single point. I keep switching and whatever I did last night didn't work. So frustrated and confused. Seems like most people have Nikons which I wish now I had. Just bought my new Canon camera and lens within the last couple months and already had a couple lenses. I love taking pictures but am so sad I can't get them right. Should I be shooting at a different aperture? Not 2.8. Thanks for any help. I've attached pics - the first 2 from last night and the last one 1359 from last week.

[Doug Sundseth]

I'm seeing two obvious sources of unsharpness in your photos here:

The first is motion blur. 1/320 sec. really isn't fast enough to stop motion in action sports. (It's also lower than the shutter speed of the photographers you noted as having good photos.) I'd recommend a shutter speed of not less than 1/500 and preferably 1/1000 second.

The second is that in at least some cases you're grabbing focus on something that isn't the primary point of action. In 1064, for instance, the background players are nicely in focus, but the tackle is out of focus. The first place I'd look would be the autofocus mode. If you're in a single shot focus mode, the play will rapidly move out of the in-focus depth of field. I'd recommend making sure that you're in single-point, continuous AF mode (whatever Canon calls that). That should help you to keep focus as the play moves.

FWIW, I don't think your problem has anything to do with the name badge on your camera. If you look on the sidelines of professional and big-time college football games, you'll probably see about as many Canons as Nikons. (As it happens, I'm a Nikon shooter and really like Nikons, but I'm under no illusion that Nikons are systematically better than Canons.)

[sbarbian]

Thank you for your response. Should I still try to stay with shooting at 2.8 when shooting football? Is that more important than the shutter, or should I set my shutter speed and let my aperture move? I know you said my shutter should be at least 500. That's probably the lower I could go at night time football games. Also, is 800 ISO to high for daytime? I have auto ISO on my Canon but not sure that it's accurate. Also, I don't have Image Stabilization on my lens. I had a real photographer friend tell me that he didn't think it was necessary when shooting sports and it was a lot more expensive.

[Doug Sundseth]

Image stabilization doesn't help much with high shutter speeds. If you're not planning to use the lens hand-held at slowish speeds, I'd say you probably made the right choice. (With the kind of shooting I do, I'll gladly pay a premium for IS/VR.)

For ISO choices, everything is a tradeoff. As your ISO goes up, your digital noise goes up, but you can shoot with smaller apertures or at high shutter speeds. I've shot at ISO 1600 and higher in daylight when I wanted to freeze action.

For shutter speed, I'd probably shoot in manual on an artificially lit field. (If the lighting is widely variable, like on some fields I've seen, this might not work very well, though.) Failing that, I'd set the ISO as high as I could stand and shoot wide open in aperture priority. Note that since the tradeoff is between noise (which is somewhat-to-mostly fixable in post) and motion blur (which is effectively impossible to fix), "as high as I could stand" is pretty high -- say ISO 4000-6400 on my camera.

For aperture, wide open means narrow DoF (about 8 feet for a subject 100 feet away at 200mm and f/2.8), so focusing becomes critical, but not wide open means slower shots and motion blur. Focusing can be difficult, but it's possible; motion blur will never get you the shots you said you want.

If you're wondering about what your camera is doing on a shot, check the EXIF data. (Ctrl-Alt-Shift I works on Photoshop, there are other ways as well.) The camera embeds the actual shooting values in each photo.

[Hill Country Hack]

I too struggle with your issue. My glass is not nearly as fast as yours, this limits me to daytime shooting.

My suggestions:
1. Shoot as wide open as you can
2. Boost your ISO until you can get at least 1/500 shutter speed
3. Find the AF Serv option on your camera. That will allow you to continually focus on the moving subjects

I have a Canon Rebel and when I am in AF serv mode it allows me to use one of the buttons on the back of my camera (this is called "back button" focussing) to act as the focus button and I keep that depressed with my thumb while tracking the action and I can actuate the shutter with the shutter release. Also, in AF serv mode you can half depress the shutter release to activate the focus and fully depress when ready to take the shot.

I hope this helps.