Help with gymnasium and red eye

anglican

I have a standard package D50 with two lenses, AF 18-55 and a 70 - 300 1:4-5.6 (that is what it says on the lenses). I used to shoot with film and I am not that familiar with digital photography. I have tried to shoot my granddaughters basketball, but I get red eye when the flash goes off. Can you give me a few instructions on how I might come even close to what I see in this forum. Thank you.

baldmountain

Most people take the shots you see on this forum without using flash. They turn up the ISO very high and have very fast lenses. f2.8 rather than the f4 you have. The reason you are getting red eye is the flash is very close to the lens. The light is going straight into the eye, bouncing off the optic nerve, and coming straight back into the lens. If you want to get rid of the red eye you have to get the flash off camera.

I also have a D50 and it's high ISO settings are quite noisy. You are going to have to work hard to get anything like the shots you see here with a D50. If you want to try without a flash, try ISO 800 and shoot in aperture mode. Set the aperture wide open, or maybe one stop less than wide open. If you have a 50mm prime lens give that a try. You'll have to move down onto the sidelines and crop with the 50mm lens.

Otherwise, get a PC cord or other mechanism to trigger the flash and hold it away from the camera and point at your subject. You are trying to increase the angle between the camera lens axis and flash light direction.

anglican

Thanks...I did some net searching and find that a 50D and a D50 are not the same animal. I am also looking for a faster lens. After reading here, I went back to the manual and saw that I could adjust the ISO to only 1600 and as you stated that will add noise. Those photographs are saw here are incredible and I don't think I could aspire to anything of that quality. I will try today to do some and try to not use the flash and see what I can do until I get a faster lens. I think that I will need to learn more about white balancing too! Anglican.smug.com are my futile attempts, I will try again.

Thanks.

johng

you're not going to get shots without flash with those lenses. Very typical settings for HS gyms are around 1/400 f2.0 ISO 1600. Shooting at f5.6 that would give you shutter speeds 3 stops lower - about 1/50.

I would recommend either buying an 85mm 1.8 or an external speedlight. Preferably the lens.

Good luck.

baldmountain

At the top of the sport section of the forum there is a thread called "So you want to shoot sports? Tips, techniques and other Resources". Here is a link http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=22950 Read the thread and it will answer a good number of your questions. Then follow the links in the "Other Resources" section and read them too. You'll come to learn that taking sport shots, and especially basketball, is really hard. It is not only technically challenging, but hard to capture the peak of action while getting the technical part right too.

A couple comments on your pictures. Get out of the stands. You really need to get down on the sidelines. This is what happens when you use flash:



You need enough light to fill the whole gym. Your flash isn't going to do it. (And is one of the reasons the sports guys don't use flash. Or if they do they use big studio strobes.)

Oh, keep in mind I am a noobie at sports too so take all I say with a grain of salt. There are MUCH better sports photographers here than me. Listen to them, not me. But I thought I'd get you started...

baldmountain

baldmountain wrote:

There are MUCH better sports photographers here than me. Listen to them, not me.

johng is one of those people. Listen to him, not me.

johng

johng wrote:

I would recommend either buying an 85mm 1.8 or an external speedlight. Preferably the lens.
quote]

To follow up - here are some shots from a few years back when I still shot with a Canon 20D. Your nikon D50 will have a bit more noise at ISO 1600 but not much. This was with a Canon 85mm 1.8 but Nikon should give similar results:






It's not as easy as it would be if you had a newer D300 or even D90 since focus systems are vastly improved. And you will also have to shoot from the floor (working range of an 85mm lens is about 25 feet max for this type of thing). It isn't easy because DOF is very shallow at f2.0 or 1.8 so your technique is important - using single focus point and keeping that focus point on an area of contrast on your subject - and keeping your subject in the frame (you'll find within 25 feet on a 1.5 crop body your subject fills a large portion of the frame). The high ISO capabilities of the D300,D700 and D3 have allowed shooters to go back to using 2.8 zoom lenses WITHOUT external light if they choose. But shooting at ISO 3200 with cameras before these models isn't a great solution. And it's not within your budget I'm guessing. So rather than post shots with my mkIII and 70-200 2.8 I thought it more relavant to post these older shots as they're similar to what you could get with your current camera with the right lens.

anglican

Thanks for your help
Those were very good shots. I will look for the 85mm f1.8 lens.

Again, thank you.

Anglican