Night time + Strong lighting

Kento · Sep 14, 2011

Hello, there's gonna be a football game over at my high school this upcoming Friday and I'm looking at some pictures that I took last week and I'm noticing some very bad lighting. For example,

This is the type of atmosphere I'll be working at and you can see that the flash used creates a very strong reflection on the skin.
I was wondering what's a good setting to work on in this type of atmosphere.

The camera I use is the Nikon D3100 with 18-55mm lens.

Thanks in advance.

480sparky · Sep 14, 2011

A different setting may not solve the issue, but off-camera flash most likely will.

bazooka · Sep 14, 2011

What is probably happening is the camera is seeing that black sky and therefore using more flash power than it needs to light the subject (the pre-flash cannot light the sky after all). Add to that their black uniforms. You may need to dial down on your flash compensation.

As for the harsh specular reflections, that's a problem with using a small, on-camera flash. If you want could try putting something over the flash to diffuse it, but it's only going to so far.

Kento · Sep 14, 2011

I see then. With that large light in the background, the flash is not really needed?

480sparky · Sep 14, 2011

Kento said:
I see then. With that large light in the background, the flash is not really needed?

If you're going to rely solely on the light in the background, you'll end up with a silhouette. However, I'm sure there more than one pole of lights surrounding the field. There's a minimum of 4, two on each side. If there's more, that means the school had more money at the time of installing lights. Depending on the quantity of ambient light, you may be able to shoot without a flash.

However, athletic lighting like this may be spot-on and very even out on the playing field, it may well end up splotchy once you get out-of-bounds.

KmH · Sep 14, 2011

TTL flash is inconsistant, because the camera is just a stupid, brainless machine that is limited to the programming that committee of Japanese software engineers wrote for the camera.

Put the flash in manual mode, and use your superior human brain. Homo Sapiens forever!