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Discovered this annual event today, took some shots of the Ellensburg High school and CWU Scrimmages. Please, any critique would be helpful, first sporting event ive shot. used my Nikon D3000.
Hey Producekid good to see more of your work again. First off, good job getting the action.
My suggestion would be to position yourself so that the light is reflecting off of the players (towards you) so you can get the most detail and fastest shutter speeds...you will also have a consistant level of lighting throughout the scene.
I typically dont like to post my photos on another thread because this is your topic but I think it will illustrate my point better. Hope it helps
Looks like pelnty going on over in E'burg. Similar to what J said above, you need to position yourself to use the light or go ahead and override the camera settings to expose what is important in a composition.
With sports, it's pretty important to get the faces in the shots. All these are under exposed and you if you didn't want to use a manual exposure then you could have used some heavy exposure compensation of at least +1 (weven more when shooting into the sun) to bring out the faces and dark sides of the uniforms. Don't worry about blowing out the highlights in shots like these, since those are usually just white areas of jerseys that don't need the detail showing.
JDueck, what did you use to take that shot? im still earning how to use my digital SLR (Used to manual 35MM from all my classes). And Tony, what do you suggest doing to get the faces, it was a hot sunny day, so that didnt help the exposure. do you suggest tightening the aperture or lowering the ISO to capture it better.
JDueck, what did you use to take that shot? im still earning how to use my digital SLR (Used to manual 35MM from all my classes). And Tony, what do you suggest doing to get the faces, it was a hot sunny day, so that didnt help the exposure. do you suggest tightening the aperture or lowering the ISO to capture it better.
That shot was with my 300f4, a D200, f10 and 1/400. BTW those are not my typical settings--I usually go for much lower DOF.
For backlit shots, like Tony said, you can just meter for the shadows a little more. There are many ways to do that. I may just set the camera to center-weighted metering and then I get a better exposure for the shadows.
No such thing as a stupid question. On my nikons you can flip the direction of the meter or at least the way the dial adds or subtracts exposure---but if you want to add light, add exposure with + if you want to subtract go to minus.
Oh and +1 may help as a starting point but each scene is different. I like to use the cameras brain sometimes so I'll set spot metering and aperture priority and point the focus dot on the shadows...this works well when you are directly behind the players and they are in shade.
In your scenario and camera settings, you add exposure (+) you will expose the details of the shadows better and subtract exposure (-) you will expose the bright areas better. This gets tricky in some situations but its a start. Maybe brush up on your camera's features a bit more. Read the manual so you know what the camera is doing and why.
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