jbouchard
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 p.2 #8 · Issues with Shooting Sports at Night with a D7100 | |
You are pushing the limits of what your camera can do. You need to learn how to maximize what you can get out of it.
Here's how auto ISO works (assuming you left the camera in P mode). Let's say you set it for minimum 1/250th, minimum ISO 800, maximum ISO 6400. In bright daylight you will get ISO 800, f8 and 1/1000th. As it gets darker, you get down to 1/250th and it opens your aperture to lens maximum. As it continues to get darker, your ISO climbs continuing with 1/250th. As it gets even darker, once your ISO hits the max, the camera has no choice but to lower the shutter speed.
My suggestion... try a bunch of different high ISOs and see what you get, in a structured experiment to help you get over the learning curve. Digital pictures are free, and hopefully nothing happens in the first part of the game while you were experimenting. For this exercise, turn off the AUTO ISO and just set ISO at 3200, aperture mode, with the lens wide open, so the shutter speed varies, and take a bunch of shots. You'll see what you are getting for shutter speeds. Then bump the ISO up to 6400, repeat, and so on, up until the maximum it will go, like to ISO+2 or whatever it's called. Once you've done that, turn on Auto ISO, and set it the max value for the rest of your game. You can't tell much from the little LCD on the camera, you really do need to bring them up on your computer at home so you can see them. Once you do, now you can decide what to set as maximum auto-ISO. I predict the answer will be leave it on the maximum value, but I think it's a valuable exercise to decide that yourself through your own experience, rather than blindly follow the advice of people on the internet.
After you have figured that out, the next thing to play with is your "noise reduction" setting and your sharpness setting. Noise Reduction smooths out some details along with the noise. Under "picture control" I think it is, you can select Standard, Neutral, etc, and inside that you can go one more screen to the right and play with individual settings like sharpness. If Noise reduction is killing your details, crank sharpness up to 5 or so. It's all about finding a happy balance. This noise reduction vs sharpness stuff only matters for the JPG's... for RAW you would do this in post. I generally shoot JPG + RAW. If I want to take a few of the best shots and process them from RAW I will, but I can't do that with a hundred shots, so it's still worth it to get the JPG's right to show to your family and friends.
When all else fails, you'll start underexposing to get shutter speeds you need. You can probably shoot about 2 stops under and still have a chance of saving them in post. When you brighten these up in post you will have noise, but it's better than blur. Some people prefer to set it to manual mode and shutter speed to a fixed value. In that case once you hit max ISO you get adjusting degrees of underexposure. Sometimes I do that, mostly I use A mode, set my exposure to about -2/3 and take my chances with the blur.
Good luck, and happy learning! if you get really frustrated, go into Scene and set it to Sports, and basically it will max things out automatically. No one has to know.
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...if you went with -1/3 or -2/3 (.7) the whites wouldn't be so hot
