Indoor Sports Question

[chainsawal]

Over the last few years I have shot a ton of outdoor competitive sports photography (i.e. soccer, softball) of my 3 girls... bright days are ok, overcast days are perfect, and I usually put the camera down once it gets too dark to shoot with my fastest lenses.

This winter, my girls are starting to play indoor sports (i.e. volleyball, basketball) and I am struggling on what equipment / settings I need to get good "freeze-action" pictures.

For reference, I own a D800 / D600 / D7000. I mainly shoot sports with the D600, but sometimes us the D800 with the grip for marginally higher FPS vs. D800 without.

Obviously I can't use strobes indoors during the event and lighting is hit and miss. I have a Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 but even using that lens, in order to get a shutter speed of 800 to 1000, the ISO is insanely high making the images very noisy. And that is wide open at 2.8. I am not expecting portrait quality, but I am currently throwing pics out entirely as they are either took dark or too grainy.

I am willing to invest in a new lens if needed, but if I can't get a f/2.8 to work, what are my options? What am I doing wrong? I see media photographers shooting indoors with the same lens on better bodies (e.g. D4) so I can't be that far off... I hope

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Chainsawal

My lens portfolio:

Nikkor 50mm f/1.8
Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8
Nikkor 80-400mm f/4-5.6 (which is not an option indoors)
Sigma 16mm Fisheye
Nikkor 105mm Macro f/2.8
Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 (my general carry around lens)

 

[The_Traveler]

How how is 'insanely high'?

post a typical terrible picture

 

[Derrel]

1/400 to 1/640 will give decent, mostly-stopped action on volleyballs, depending on the degree of speed of the ball, and the magnification of the ball. You ought to be able to use the 50mm lens from courtside and get some decent shots. Or move up into the stands a few rows, VOlleyball can be shot from several different heights and positions, depending on what you want to show. You ought to be able to pull f/2.8 at 1/500 at ISO 3,200 to 6,400 in an average high school gymnasium, without any Herculean effort.

Your 70-200 ought to allow you pretty easy shooting of kill shots and blocks at the net, shooting from behind the end-lines using the D800.

 

[chainsawal]

Thanks, I will test it out again tonight and post some pictures if I continue to have issues.

Guess I have become spoiled by those beautiful stop action soccer shots on an overcast sunny day

 

[KmH]

Lots of indoor sports shooters use strobe lighting. from hot shoe flash units to radio triggered studio type monolights mounted up above the floor.
No doubt, that usually entails getting permission from the venue to set up the strobes.

 

[hirejn]

There is no other lens. Even at 1/1500 pictures will be soft with a 1.8 because of the shallow DOF and constantly moving subjects. If you already have 2.8, you have what sports pros have been using for decades, indoors and out.

Firstly, shooting should be done on manual because what you're after is the flash exposure, not ambient. The ambient won't change much since the lighting is a fixed continuous source. Matrix metering wouldn't make much sense as it will vary wherever you point the camera. Get the ambient exposure and drop it by about 1 stop via ISO. Then go to rear curtain and let TTL flash illuminate and freeze the subject. I've never been to a school sporting event that didn't allow flash, but you have to follow the rules. The D800 is not exactly a go-to high ISO camera. It competes, but it doesn't replace the D3s or D4 if you want to shoot just ambient with relatively clean files, assuming the ambient is there. If it's not, there's nothing you can do short of flash.

Also, I always recommend shooting RAW. It gives you the ability to fine tune noise reduction and sharpening in post, and with Lightroom you can get one image how you want it and batch process the rest with a couple of clicks.

 

[imagemaker46]

You need 500th at 2.8 to stop anything, you'll have to work with the iso to get that. Forget the idea of strobes, if you could afford to put in strobes you could afford to buy a better camera. Try doing some stuff around the bench, emotion type images, you won't be needing the higher shutter speed for this and then you can drop the iso. Flash on the camera will end up causing you problems from the players.

 

[weepete]

^^ This.

What settings are you using?

 

[JoeW]

There is no other lens. Even at 1/1500 pictures will be soft with a 1.8 because of the shallow DOF and constantly moving subjects. If you already have 2.8, you have what sports pros have been using for decades, indoors and out.

Firstly, shooting should be done on manual because what you're after is the flash exposure, not ambient. The ambient won't change much since the lighting is a fixed continuous source. Matrix metering wouldn't make much sense as it will vary wherever you point the camera. Get the ambient exposure and drop it by about 1 stop via ISO. Then go to rear curtain and let TTL flash illuminate and freeze the subject. I've never been to a school sporting event that didn't allow flash, but you have to follow the rules. The D800 is not exactly a go-to high ISO camera. It competes, but it doesn't replace the D3s or D4 if you want to shoot just ambient with relatively clean files, assuming the ambient is there. If it's not, there's nothing you can do short of flash.

Also, I always recommend shooting RAW. It gives you the ability to fine tune noise reduction and sharpening in post, and with Lightroom you can get one image how you want it and batch process the rest with a couple of clicks.

EXACTLY!!! Think about this for a second...if you shot an athlete who was moving at f1.8, her head (most of it) would be in focus but her shoulders (and arms and anything beyond her upper thighs) would be out of the DoF.

A 200mm f2.8 is sufficient for pro work (with the caveat that in some sports it's going to be a 400mm f2.8). Anything "faster" isn't going to be usable for sports b/c the DoF will be so small.

 

[imagemaker46]

There is no other lens. Even at 1/1500 pictures will be soft with a 1.8 because of the shallow DOF and constantly moving subjects. If you already have 2.8, you have what sports pros have been using for decades, indoors and out.

Firstly, shooting should be done on manual because what you're after is the flash exposure, not ambient. The ambient won't change much since the lighting is a fixed continuous source. Matrix metering wouldn't make much sense as it will vary wherever you point the camera. Get the ambient exposure and drop it by about 1 stop via ISO. Then go to rear curtain and let TTL flash illuminate and freeze the subject. I've never been to a school sporting event that didn't allow flash, but you have to follow the rules. The D800 is not exactly a go-to high ISO camera. It competes, but it doesn't replace the D3s or D4 if you want to shoot just ambient with relatively clean files, assuming the ambient is there. If it's not, there's nothing you can do short of flash.

Also, I always recommend shooting RAW. It gives you the ability to fine tune noise reduction and sharpening in post, and with Lightroom you can get one image how you want it and batch process the rest with a couple of clicks.

EXACTLY!!! Think about this for a second...if you shot an athlete who was moving at f1.8, her head (most of it) would be in focus but her shoulders (and arms and anything beyond her upper thighs) would be out of the DoF.

A 200mm f2.8 is sufficient for pro work (with the caveat that in some sports it's going to be a 400mm f2.8). Anything "faster" isn't going to be usable for sports b/c the DoF will be so small.

Anything can be used to shoot sports. The Canon 200mm f2 isn't far off 1.8 The limitations are in the hands and brains of the user.

 

[chainsawal]

I appreciate the feedback. Yeah, I get the wide open dialogue... even at 2.8 sometimes I feel like the DoF isn't ideal for the shot I wanted.

I was actually at a game tonight and the local paper was there shooting but he had a pocket wizard and two stobes up in the stands on both sides of one end. He actually told me he would share the channel with me as long as I don't go nuts if we are ever at the same event. Nice of him... but I see him maybe 1 of every 6 or7 games. I do have 4 pocket wizards thankfully I use with my basic SB800/900 flashes for the rare portraiture shots.

I may just have to invest in higher end body before things are done.

Lens wise, I feel like my only big gaps are the 85mm and 400mm f/2.8. Other than those, I am not really dying for anything new.

And to someone's question above, I do shoot RAW... but I regret the D800 purchase because the file sizes are huge (e.g. 55MB). I own a Drobo with 15TB of space and I still find myself culling pictures or saving things to other formats to keep space reasonable. The D600 is actually a better sports camera IMO so I should have saved my money on the D800 and put it towards a D4 or something else. In hindsight, owning a D800 and D600 was not a wise move on my part... I thought I would be doing more portraiture... but I love sports and my kids are in sports so 90% of my shots are sports.

 

[Tailgunner]

And to someone's question above, I do shoot RAW... but I regret the D800 purchase because the file sizes are huge (e.g. 55MB). I own a Drobo with 15TB of space and I still find myself culling pictures or saving things to other formats to keep space reasonable. The D600 is actually a better sports camera IMO so I should have saved my money on the D800 and put it towards a D4 or something else. In hindsight, owning a D800 and D600 was not a wise move on my part... I thought I would be doing more portraiture... but I love sports and my kids are in sports so 90% of my shots are sports.

I would think shooting in Jpeg would be your best bet for sports. It's faster than RAW allowing you to capture more frames.

Anyhow, I've got the same set up (D800/70-200mm VR II) but I haven't tried stopping down further than F/4.5 out of fear of the shots being too soft. I think the next game I'm going to switch back to my D300. I got the D800 for city and landscapes.

 

[sk66]

I don't think a new body is going to be a huge improvement; the D600 does fine (when downsampled). I dread using my D4 above ISO 6400 in low light; 6400 is just tolerable.
There's a few things you may be doing "wrong;" the first would be judging image noise of the 24MP D600 at 100%, 50% would be more reasonable.

Second, with higher ISO's a lot of the noise is "color noise" and not "luminance noise." A lot of color noise can be removed w/o significantly degrading image detail.

I know this will go against what a lot of others say, but IMO, once you get to the signal floor (basically the last "usable" ISO) you are better off underexposing the image and recovering in post. You loose a lot of sensor capability (DR/Color Sensitivity/etc) at higher ISO's...most of this is due to not saturating the sensor, but not all of it. You can retain a little more DR/Color/etc by underexposing when pushing the limits, but the main benefit is you get to decide where/how/how much noise is added in post.

As for aperture/DOF. You may be better off with a wider aperture lens and shooting from further away (i.e. shooting "loose"). This will get you higher SS's at lower ISO's while maintaining DOF (distance has ~2x the effect on DOF that aperture does). Yes, you will have to crop more, but cropping a better image is more beneficial that recording an unusable image.

 

[sk66]

The D800 is not a sports/action/low light camera... I do use mine for that sometimes (the D800 is my "second body") with a grip in DX mode.... but for that use I should have just kept the D7000.