Solved! How to take action sports pictures at night with D70

jim3607

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Feb 13, 2011
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Hello,
I am trying to take sports (soccer/lacrosse) pictures at night. Shutter speed of 1/125 does not allow for a low enough aperture setting to get good pictures. Field is pretty well lit but as good as the D70 is it cannot create more light so I was wondering if anyone knew any tips for forcing the D70 to try harder.
 
Solution
I'm not trying to be an smart a$$ here but, 'just wondering if you set your lens to its lowest aperture and set the camera to higher ISO, is your lens a fast lens and does it feature Vibration Reduction? use of a monopod or a tripod instead of handheld is better.

In addition to what fihart suggested, one other trick is to anticipate the movement and take the shot before or after the peak. Since using flash is useless when taken pictures from a distance, set the camera to take multiple (rapid) shot instead of single shot. You’ll have more chance to get a better shot.
G

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You might try reducing resolution which may allow faster shutter speed and reduced blur (and/or reduced cycle for next picture) .

Forgive me if I'm way off on this suggestion as it's only based on my observation that shooting evening meetings regularly in the same rooms using compact digitals, I've experienced more blur as I've upgraded to better cameras with more megapix.
 

rexter

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Mar 17, 2006
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I'm not trying to be an smart a$$ here but, 'just wondering if you set your lens to its lowest aperture and set the camera to higher ISO, is your lens a fast lens and does it feature Vibration Reduction? use of a monopod or a tripod instead of handheld is better.

In addition to what fihart suggested, one other trick is to anticipate the movement and take the shot before or after the peak. Since using flash is useless when taken pictures from a distance, set the camera to take multiple (rapid) shot instead of single shot. You’ll have more chance to get a better shot.
 
Solution

imabug

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Jun 26, 2004
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Set your ISO to 400 (higher if you're willing to tolerate the extra noise) and use the widest aperture setting your lens is capable of. if you can get away with it, use a shutter speed of 1/60 - 1/80. it should be fast enough to freeze most action.

you'll probably want to set your camera to use a single focus point rather than multiple points because of the shallow depth of field you're going to get. That will help make sure you're focused on the subject rather than the background

you can also try bumping up the exposure compensation a step or two.

If you shoot in RAW, you can use something like Lightroom or Elements to post-process and bring up the brightness further if all of the above still leaves you with slightly underexposed images. You can do the same with JPG, but RAW gives you a little more flexibility.