What settings for night sports

[Grandpaw]

I have a Nikon D90 with a Nikon 70-200VR 2.8 lens. I was taking pictures at my grandson's baseball game the other night and my camera was on ISO 3200 using the 2.8 lens at 1/500 and the EV was up +2 and the pictures were still dark. If I put them into Photoshop and up the exposure by 2 they look pretty good. Now for my questions.

What settings out doors under lights do you use? I know it depends on the lighting at each field.

Do you think getting a Nikon D7000 will correct my problem, Jeff

[Chris350]

Unless if you can get a 4 stop improvement in ISO.. I suspect that the answer is no. You need more ambient light or supplemental lighting. Little league fields are notoriously dark places. For that matter so are most non professional sport venues.

[zerodog]

The correct settings will vary for any situation. So there is no single answer. If you look at your histogram and your shot preview and it looks dark, it is dark. Or if it is too bright, it is.....too bright. So you will have to setup for whatever gives you correct exposure. There is no magic for getting around it.

Things to remember with low light:
Correct WB helps you set the exposure correctly in the camera. Your overall quality will go up if you get it as close as possible in the camera. This is true even shooting RAW.

The better you expose in camera the less noise you will introduce in PP. At the upper limits of your camera's ISO this is VERY important.

Remember you can do things to fix or reduce noice, you can not fix motion blur. So you need to use a shutter speed that gives the results you need here or all else is useless.

Also remember IS or VR only helps your hand shake. It does nothing at all for motion blur.

[dmourati]

You're pretty much in the coffin corner here. The D90 has really good high ISO performance. you may see some benefit with a newer sensor like the D7000. You've got good wide aperture glass with the 70-200 f/2.8. You can try working the shutter speed down a little bit to get more light. This will be good for more static shots but not so much peak action.

I'd try to walk around the field a bit to see if there are some particular locations, like homeplate for example, that are just better lit. Maybe the middle of the infield would be dark but the third base line is 1 or two stops brighter.

The last option, mentioned above is to incorporate flash. Definitely check with your league or coach before trying this as some organizations won't like the distraction.

[dhyravy]

Since flash is pretty much universally not allowed for night baseball the only option is a camera body with higher ISO capabilities. At high ISO, underexposure and fixing in post is not really an option since pushing the exposure also highlights the noise. As has already been said, you need to nail the exposure at high ISOs. The downside to the camera ISO range is that bodies that can go higher than 3200 get into the "pro" category and the $$$$ get prohibitive if you're not making money on the shots.

[Old Timer]

Some good answers Jeff to an age old problem for sports photographers. The only thing that I would add is with LL baseball I have found I can get away with a little slower shutter speed, you might give that a try.