Need help with shooting football games at night!

[lschafer]

This photo was shot on my first try with my Canon Rebel XSI. Trying to figure out how to shoot action shots at night....has been difficult! I usually attempt Manual, ISO 1600 and then play with my aperture. Thoughts? What can I do to improve?

Settings:

1/50 sec at f5.6, ISO 1600, 300 mm

[karen_s]

I shot some football this past fall and it is quite challenging. The light is bad!

Anyway, by looking at your exif data, I am wondering what the widest aperture is on the lens you are using. If 5.6 is as wide as it will go, you will probably not get many sharp, properly exposed night shots. Do you have any 2.8 or wider lenses? If so, I would try one of those. A 2.8 will make the few stops difference that will allow you to get your shutter speed up to a useful number. At 300mm you really need to get the shutter speed up into the 500's to avoid the blur of camera shake and I doubt the football field has enough light for that. (If your lens has image stabilization, you can get away with a bit less on shutter speed.)

If you don't have a 2.8 or wider I think you still have a few options, but they are a bit limited. 1. Around here (I'm in the same state), the games early in the season usually start before the sun has set so get to the game early and fill up your card before the sun disappears. Shooting warmups can be a great time to get some interesting shots too. 2. Get your hands on a 2.8 lens. If you don't want to buy one, you can rent one online. (A Canon 70-200 2.8 IS L would work well.) Also, the Canon 85 1.8 is a great lens for the money. It's quite versatile as many use it for indoor sports and portraits and it has that wide aperture useful for low light situations. 3. Use shorter focal lengths to avoid the blur from camera shake. It's tempting to reach out to 300mm but unless your lens is a 2.8, you won't be able to get up to the required shutter speed.

Wish I could help you more.

[inkista]

This will make your shots noisier, but another thing you can try doing is shooting RAW, setting the camera to iso 1600, and then underexposing all your shots by one to two stops via the shutter speed, and then adjusting the exposure brighter in post-processing. It will definitely increase your noise, but you'll be able to user faster shutter speeds to reduce motion blur. If you push it by one stop, you're faking having iso 3200, and if by two stops, you're faking iso 6400.

This is essentially what the 40D does in-camera to make an iso 3200 setting, and what the 50D does in camera to get the iso 6400 and 12800 settings. This kind of digital push processing is what's meant when an iso setting is described as pushed or enhanced.

Also, going the other direction--"pull" processing--overexposing and then adjusting the exposure darker in post-processing, will reduce noise. This is how many Nikon camera bodies achieve iso 100, even though iso 200 is the base iso of the sensor.