This past week has been a photographically action packed week for me. Last Thursday October 20th, I went up to New York with Ryan Mewha, Austin Stover and Braden Gross to watch the Philadelphia Union play the New York Red Bulls. Tuesday October 25th I watched our women's Field Hockey team defeat Delaware Valley College 6-1. Later on Tuesday October 25th I went and photographed intramural soccer as well. All three events were interesting scenarios for photography, the Union game was at night under artificial light, while the Field Hockey game was in the evening with the sun setting right behind the trees; shadowing half the field while the other half was covered by the blaring sun. Shooting the intramural sports was similar to the Union game because it was indoor under artificial light as well.
For most sports occasions you can get away with simply putting the camera on the sports or action setting. For the Union game I started out on the action setting to see if I could get away with it, but given the lighting it made most of the shots slightly blurred. In this case, since the artificial light created a false sense of light, the action setting, operating on its normal settings, over compensated. The action setting told the camera to let in too much light dulling down the quality of the photo.
In the picture on the left I was using the action setting, in which you can see that camera was not compensating for the artificial light. In this case the the goalie is slightly blurred and the hue/saturation of the picture is very dull. Where as in the picture on the right I switched the setting to manuel (which most cameras have) where you can see I set the ISO and Shutter speed higher. In the first picture the shutter speed was open for 1/320th of a second but in the second picture I shortened the shutter speed ever so slightly to 1/500th of a second to let less light in which enriches the saturation and allows the image to be more crisp. This also allows me to capture the player more stationary with out blur. However, to compensate for letting less light in I also needed to heighten the ISO. What this does is it requires less light in order for the picture to develop. This explains why I am able to let less light in but get a better exposure.
ISO 2500 Shutter Speed:1/320 Aperture:f/5.6 ISO 3600 Shutter Speed:1/500 Aperture:f/5.6
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In the second scenario at the field hockey game it was much more difficult to find the happy medium to shoot because I was constantly moving from light to dark. For this occasion I was again in the manual setting, but I put the ISO on auto so the camera would detect the amount of light needed to develop the photo. In the picture on the left the player is mostly shadowed by the trees on the back side of the field hockey field. In both these pictures I chose a 7.1 aperture (also known as f-stop) given the lighting situation. Generally f/8.0 is considered the middle of the aperture scale, usually used for normal sunny days. The smaller the f-stop the more light that is let in, the higher the f-stop the amount of light lessens. I chose 7.1 because in some cases there was an ample amount of light on the field, but in other cases there was less light. I did not go lower than 7.1 because there was still an ample amount of day light in all the pictures. In the picture on the right there are actually two things wrong. First, the ISO is too high, since the player is in the sun the camera needs less light to develop the picture, but what happened was the camera picked up on the shade in the players behind her and the background over compensating which explains why the picture is slightly blurred. Second, the Aperture is actually too low in this picture which allowed more light to come in, over exposing the picture and creating low quality.
ISO 2000 Shutter Speed:1/1000 Aperture:f/7.1 ISO 3200 Shutter Speed:1/1000 Aperture:f/7.1
Indoor sports are generally a hard activity to capture, at least in my experiences and from professionals I know. In picture on the right is actually taken correctly, correct ISO, shutter speed and aperture. However, the picture on the right is the one I am pointing out. In this case, the same environment as the photo on the right (actually the same game) the shutter speed is too low and the ISO is to high. If the shutter speed was higher then the player would be more stationary and less blurred like the player on the right. In order to fix this the shutter speed would need to be quicker allowing the camera to capture the player and ball mid strike, but as the shutter speed goes up the light being let in decreases. Thus, by upping the shutter speed you would need to lower the ISO in order to amp up the amount of light needed to develop the picture.
ISO 2000 Shutter Speed:1/200 Aperture:f/6.3 ISO 2000 Shutter Speed:1/200 Aperture:f/6.3
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