Girls Volleyball

[AndersonCAA]

Some fun shots from a girls volleyball game last night. This gym is absolutely horrendous to shoot in. Very band lighting with a floor that has old varnish that casts a bad, yellowish glow. Makes for a real challenge in getting a decent white balance.

[JSPhoto]

Wait til a week from Saturday (the 7th of October) and I'll show you shots from two gyms in one school that is worse to shoot in. The lighting is so bad you must shoot from above and use the reflection off the floor to get enough light to shoot at 1600 ISO and 160 shutter! It's also got the dark old yellowed floor, but adds the off yellow walls and a mixture of sodium & florescent lights doesn't help matters.
I'll be shooting the county volleyball tourney there and I normally get two or three shots good enough for tyhe paper to use.....I hate shooting there and have tried to get them to repaint the walls white and put in new lights....without any luck, heck, it's hard to get them to replace blown bulbs! I usually only shoot volleyball once a year there because it is so bad

JS

[AndersonCAA]

Maybe we should have a contest of what the worst gym and high school football/soccer stadium lighting is. Hmmm, how could we do that?

[JSPhoto]

Maybe we should have a contest of what the worst gym and high school football/soccer stadium lighting is. Hmmm, how could we do that?

LOL, I have a whole list of em I lost one on the list though They finally fixed one gym after years of complaints. Football fields here are not too bad, but one is so bad they also turn on the baseball field lights. Meanwhile the smallest school around has the best lit field around (the biggest school has the worst lighting!)
Oh, and the two worst lit soccer fields both have no lights at all. In fact one school has to rent lights for sectional games....now there is a joke.

JS

[Whowe]

You guys were all so helpful when i bought my camera, I hope you don't mind helping again. I do volleyball almost exclusively, so I know crappy gym lighting. I've been shooting with my Quanteray 70-200 f4.5, and having to go 1600 ISO and low shutter speed just to get anything at all. But I'm pretty excited, my new Sigma 70-200 f2.8 came yesterday. The problem is, I've been shooting with primarily the same settings for so long, just adjusting shutter speed for the particular gym lighting, that I don't know where to start with my new lens.

Although I don't post often, I read almost daily, and I've learned so much, I want to say thanks to all the "regulars".

[AndersonCAA]

I've posted this before and it works well for me. What I do is set my camera for RAW and shoot at ISO 1000. 1600 is too noisy for me, even with noise reduction software. I then set my camera to aperture priority at f2.8 I then purposely underexpose by one full stop. This allows me to get a faster shutter speed of 1/250 or sometimes better. When post processing I use Canon's Digital Photo Professional software to batch process all the images one stop back to the correct exposure. That's what I did with the images posted above. When I bring the image back up to normal exposure using the DPP software the detail comes out and I have a decently exposed image.

Try experimenting and see what happens with your new lens. Good luck!

[Old Timer]

Oh yeah!! I'd have an entry or two in that contest.

[AndersonCAA]

Wouldn't that be kind of fun? No winners or anything, just submissions of locations where we all use the same ISO, aperture and shutter speed and set our cameras to AWB and we'll post the pics to see the lovely color casts we get. Just think of all the colors of the rainbow we'll see with all the mix of lights that are in high school gyms these days.

[Old Timer]

I think it would be a blast to try.