Women's College Volleyball

Here are a few from tonights Iowa Minnesota Volleyball game. It was nice to shoot VB match where there was some decent light instead of the high school gyms my daughter plays in.
Picture 1 - 4 shot 1/500 sec f/2.8 iso 1250
Picture 5 shot 1/400 sec f/2.8 iso 800

Any advice on how to improve would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Really nice shots. Sharp for ISO 1250. I like 1, 2, and 4. Number 3 seems to be somewhat soft, almost like the active focus area was in the middle of the shot, and the camera had some trouble determining what to lock on to.

Are you setting ISA manually or is auto ISO on? I'm guessing that 5 is darker due to the background not being reflective (also thinking that the ISO is low for the shutter speed). It could also be that the lights were cycling.

Looks like you were able to move around quite a bit at Carver. Like the different angles. Those girls have some serious ups. Who won?

One and Five are my favorites of this bunch. You caught some great action. Don't you love having decent light to shoot indoor sports. It look like your D80 preformed pretty well at 1250, better than my D200 would have I think. Did you run these through a noise reduction program?

I just spent some big bucks and got the D700 mainly because all our local gyms are so dark that it was either spend money on B's or more speed lights or upgrade cameras. I went with the camera hope it was worth it.

I only used photoshop elemets reduce noise filter. (I hear a lot of folks talk about using noise ninja but have not tried that yet. Is it worth the $80?
Congratulations on the D700. I am very jealous! My appropriations committee (aka my wife) will not approve that amount yet :(
I am anxious to hear your thoughts on how it does in low light.

You did end up with some nice shots. Your focal point on the third shot is off and the last shot is a bit dark, but otherwise nice action.

I think you did very well capturing the action. Volleyball is very fast pace and is can be rough to shoot and capture action. You might try focusing on a paticular girl to get the action and then move on to another one. You shot these at a nice shutter speed, but you might consider increasing your ISO to 1600 to give you either a faster shutter or even wider depth by decreasing your aperture to f/4.0.

Jim

There's some great emotion and action that you've caught kudos.

Also double kudos for photographing a women's VB match... yeah... :D

Women VB & Tennis players are definitely the hottest of female atheletes ;)