5th grade gymnasium lighting = lousy pics

Mitchell · October 25, 2005

Tried my new 85mm, f1.8 today. The gym is still too dark for basketball photos requiring high iso which is not my Nikon's forte. Absolutely no flash allowed in the gym. The lens is nice and light. Perfect reach for me. I just wish they had better lighting. Any suggestions for future games or should I just give up?

Put me in, Coach!

Point guard

Teammates

Proud mom

ian408 · October 26, 2005

Can you tell us a bit about the EXIF? I'm guessing you'll want to increase the
ISO, shoot wide open and set a custom white balance. You might chose to
shoot in ap prio. Alternatively, you could shoot in RAW and then correct the
WB in post. But you're better off getting it right in camera.

That should help you with the shutter speed and with the strange color cast.

Keep going back to shoot. You should see improvement with the white
balance as well as increased ISO.

The young lady's got a lovely smile too.

Nordic · October 26, 2005

I think these pictures are quite good!

Anyway, I would set ISO speed to the maximum. A picture thats a little noisy is better than a picture full of blur, and there always is NeatImage.

:

Then I would use shutter priority and shoot RAW. A little underexposure can be corrected in postprocessing, a totally blurred picture not.

And finally, a little motion blur can add great to the pics! But you have to get a feeling for this. To much and it becomes a mess, to little and it looks to static, frozen in time.

:

Regards,
Andreas

mercphoto · October 26, 2005

ian408 wrote:

...I'm guessing you'll want to increase the
ISO, shoot wide open and set a custom white balance. You might chose to shoot in ap prio. Alternatively, you could shoot in RAW and then correct the WB in post. But you're better off getting it right in camera.

Excellent advice to get it right in-camera and not rely on post-production as your crutch and I wanted to second that advice.

The big problem you will have with the gym with regards white balance will be the lighting they use, however. Some types of lights are well behaved and have a relatively consistent color cast over the duration of the sine curve of the main power supply. Others do not, and their color cast will change as the power goes from full-on to full-off. There are only a few ways to combat this problem.

1) Use a shutter speed of 1/60 or 1/125. Either one will guarantee the shutter is open for a full-cycle or a half-cycle, respectively. Thus either shutter speed will guarantee you get all the possible color casts the light source will put out. You can therefore use a custom white balance to correct for it. Notice that 1/90 shutter speed is problematic still.

2) If you can, use 1/125 and use flash to stop motion. You said you can't use flash but I wanted to throw this out. I shot martial arts for a friend who owns the studio. I went manual at f/4 and 1/125 with the flash on ETTL-2. The flash will freeze a lot (but not all) of the motion, even given the slow shutter.

3) Use a faster shutter speed (to stop motion), shoot RAW, and do white balance correction later. This is easiest to do if there is something white or neutral grey in the frame to eye dropper on.

DRT-Maverick · October 26, 2005

I have a suggestion. Your photos are great, the poses and such. So beat the heck out of the janitors and make them replace the lighting! :P

Have you tried shooting in RAW mode? Might help to adjust the temperature and tints and such in RAW mode in photoshop. Helped out for me a little.

Mitchell · October 26, 2005

Great suggestions everyone. Just what I'm looking for.

I will shoot raw next time. Does anyone know the K of what I'm assuming are sodium vapor lights. I guess my best bet will be to custom white balance on a grey card next time.

The general consensus is noise is preferable to blurry. I shot these at iso 600. They look plenty noisy to me. Next time I'll increase the iso and compare.

mercphoto · October 26, 2005

Mitchell wrote:

I will shoot raw next time. Does anyone know the K of what I'm assuming are sodium vapor lights. I guess my best bet will be to custom white balance on a grey card next time.

I think Sodium Vapor is one of those lights that behaves poorly during the duration of the sign curve. Given this, if you shoot at 1/125, shoot a grey card and go with a custom white balance and you will be fine. If you prefer to shoot at a faster shutter speed then no custom white balance is going to save you, you will need to tweak the white balance of each photo individually in post.

tmlphoto · October 26, 2005

Mitch,
I agree with Bill. Shoot RAW on auto white balance. If the lights are consistent you can batch apply the color balance in CS2 in about 10 seconds. If not, you can easily adjust for your keepers. I can post process RAW images as fast or faster than JPEG and almost always shoot RAW now. Don't be afraid to up your ISO to at least 800. That fancy Nikon you have should handle that just fine. 1600 would probably be OK , especially with a little noise ninja thrown it. Keep your shutter speeds around 1/320-1/400. You can play around with changing the shutter speeds and ISO and f/stop by 1/3 stops to get the best result. I would probaly just shoot manual as the EV level should be pretty constant.

rutt · October 26, 2005

It's so much easier if you get it close to right when you shoot. If you shoot raw, you really don't have to worry much about WB while shooting and it gives you a little leeway about exposure.

But when you don't get it right when you shoot, you can still fix a surprising amount of stuff in post if the shots are precious. Are any of these?

ian408 · October 27, 2005

rutt wrote:

It's so much easier if you get it close to right when you shoot. If you shoot raw, you really don't have to worry much about WB while shooting and it gives you a little leeway about exposure.

But when you don't get it right when you shoot, you can still fix a surprising amount of stuff in post if the shots are precious. Are any of these?

While I agree mostly, I argue that the nearer you get to perfect in camera,
the better off you are when it comes to post.

You'd be far better off nailing the shot than trying to fix it in post. Further,
it is (in my opinion) a disservice to further the myth that RAW is your savior.
While RAW offerss you so much more, it is so not the right way to approach
shooting.

Ian

tmlphoto · October 27, 2005

Sorry to highjack this thread, but I wanted to clarify.
I totally agree that getting it correct in camera is the best, especailly when it comes to exposure. RAW does let you tweak the exposure within a certain range, but does degrade the quality the more you have to adjust. I agree it should be used as a substitue for trying to determine the best exposure. Certainly adjusting exposure by plus/minus .5 stops doesn't visibly degrade the image quality.
White Balance, on the other hand, is essentially post processing, whether in camera or not. I find it much easier to adjust in post. I often warm up my images slightly or simply season to taste. White balance was the main issue that led me down the RAW path.
Again, sorry for the highjack Mitch.

rutt · October 27, 2005

The hijack is interesting, but let's adjourn to a separate thread in the proper forum:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=21251

5th grade gymnasium lighting = lousy pics

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