HELP! Arena Lighting!
Hello shooters!
This is gonna be a little different than sports but I thought the lighting could be similar. I am shooting a livestock show in an arena coming up soon. I have tried this before but had a lot of trouble with tone, noise and blur.
I use a Canon 40d and various lenses.
Any suggestion on settings, equipment, filters or anything for that matter would be great! I would think that indoor sports arena might have similar lighting. IDK!
Thanks for the help!
SS
:scratch
This is gonna be a little different than sports but I thought the lighting could be similar. I am shooting a livestock show in an arena coming up soon. I have tried this before but had a lot of trouble with tone, noise and blur.
I use a Canon 40d and various lenses.
Any suggestion on settings, equipment, filters or anything for that matter would be great! I would think that indoor sports arena might have similar lighting. IDK!
Thanks for the help!
SS
:scratch
0
Comments
Tone, noise and blur. Yep, very similar to sports.
OK, first noise. You're going to get noise at higher ISOs. Unfortunately higher ISO is often necessary. The key to keeping the noise to a minimum is to ensure the shots are properly exposed. "Proper" exposure may be different than what the camera THINKS the exposure should be. In general you want to be sure the image you captured looks properly exposed in the LCD. It should look just as "bright" as a shot in good indoor lighting. I.E. don't allow yourself to say "its a little dark but the lighting is bad so that's ok". Nope - your subject has to be properly exposed to keep noise to a minimum
Blur - well, that's because you don't have fast enough shutter speeds. In the worst case you're getting camera shake because your speeds are too slow to hand hold. I'm assuming the livestock is moving so we can't just address camera shake we have to be able to stop the action. Assuming it's just a walk, then 1/250 should be an acceptable speed. You may have to crank the ISO up to 1600 or 3200 and shoot at f2.8 to get that speed if the lighting is really poor.
Tone - normally you'll have white balance issues indoors. The real question is whether the lighting is CONSISTENT. If it's consistent - even if poor - you can set a custom WB. Your manual will explain how to set the custom WB if you haven't done so yet. Just make sure that the white object (and my advice is bring your own - don't try to use something you think is white in the scene) is under the lights in question. I.E. if the show area has different lighting than the stands you need to be in the show area when you shoot the white object. Also, take the WB shot with a shutter speed of 1/60. That will give you an average temperature for the lighting. If lighting is consistent that will give you the best WB vs. using a fast 1/500 that captures the light during it's cycle. Once you've done the custom WB simply take a series of a dozen shots or so around the show area. Play them back on the LCD - you'll know immediately if the custom WB will work. If not you'll see all different color casts. That usually occurs when the lights are spread so far apart you don't get overlapping fields of light. If that does occur your only option is to shoot RAW. At which point you set WB during your RAW conversion.