Sports pictures at night

[mroe]

I have a Canon Rebel EOS DS6041. In the sports mode, in the day time it freezes action just fine. But at night, the pictures are bluring. I know there must be some settings in the manual mode that I must change. Can someone reccommend some settings to use?

[noladave]

2 things to know: use ISO 1600, and use the fastest lens possible, a 2.8 or faster. Remember the lower the number - 1.8, 2.8, etc. the faster the lens. IN order to get the rebel to shoot at 1600 ISO, you have to move the dial to Av. Once there, hit the ISO button, and then turn the dial to 1600.

Canon chose 400 for the sports mode, and that's becuase it's a compromise of speed and noise. Here is a picture that I took Tuesday night, using the Rebel, and the Canon 70-200 F2.8 lens -


Good luck.

[another view]

All good advice from Dave. I would also shoot in aperture priority automatic mode, picking the widest aperture. This will give you the fastest shutter speed possible. You will have a shallow depth of field this way so not every shot of a moving subject is going to be sharp. With practice, your "keeper" rate will go up.

Something I experimented with a little last night at a concert was shooting 1/2 stop underexposed - my theory is that you can fix it in Photoshop with a little work, and gain a little faster shutter speed. With that, you'll probably wind up with a bit more noise in the finished image but I'm not sure just yet... If you try this, keep an eye on the histogram to make sure you're not too underexposed.