Spent an enjoyable, although very cold, evening photographing Tyler and the Miner soccer team this past Tuesday evening, January 22nd.
It was a well fought and played game from both teams. Anderson ended up edging out the Miners 4-3. There were some great saves by the goalie, and some great plays on offense and defense.
I understand now why if you do sports photography for a living you need a f 2.8 lens. In the tough lighting conditions you need all the speed from your lens that you can get. With the tough lighting I kept the aperture at f 4. Even with my lens wide open and the ISO set to 1000, I still needed a relatively slow shutter speed of 1/125th to not under expose shots to the point of usability. I tried going higher on the ISO but the images were just to grainy for my liking. If the lighting is good the ISO at that value isn’t to bad, but in the tough conditions where you actually use a high ISO the D7000 was much to grainy for detailed sports shots in a lit stadium.
I found sports photography very enjoyable in this kind of setting. There is lots of room to move around the soccer field and get into position without being in the way or distracting for the players. The fast pace and the action makes it difficult and enjoyable to fire off a string of photographs and see the framed action.
Here are some of the shots I took that night. I had to ramp up the exposure in post processing and added some noise reduction to clean up the images. These were shot with my D7000 24-120mm f 4 zoom, iso 1000, aperture f 4 and shutter speed 1/125th.
