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Archive 2017 · Metering Under Poor Stadium Lighting: Your Approach?

  
 
PureMichigan
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Metering Under Poor Stadium Lighting: Your Approach?


I'm hitting a patch in the high school football season where the games now start in the dark and I'm covering some very small schools with truly awful stadium lighting.

I'm resigned to the fact that the picture will be pretty poor no matter what I do --- but just wondering ... what metering modes are people using under truly horrible night lighting: spot, partial, or matrix? Does it seem to make a material difference?




Oct 02, 2017 at 09:30 AM
cocodrillo
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Metering Under Poor Stadium Lighting: Your Approach?


If the light is consistently bad across the field, go full manual. If bad in a large chunk and horrible in the rest, still go manual and stay out of the cave. I shoot at an ok lit pro stadium and have basically quit on the endzones. If a light is coming over my shoulder, I move so one is.


Oct 02, 2017 at 11:21 AM
schlotz
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Metering Under Poor Stadium Lighting: Your Approach?


Tried them all. In the end, bad lighting is bad lighting. Add to that is their cycling rate, which throws colors out of wack. If your body has a cycling feature, it can help but even that has a draw back since it constrains the fps in an attempt to match up with the cycling rate. I've found that on some fields, setting the AWB to a kelvin amount (body w/out cycling feature) got me a bit more consistent results however they still require PP. I've long since reverted back to evaluative (your matrix I believe) and work with what I get.


Oct 03, 2017 at 06:42 AM
gene2632
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Metering Under Poor Stadium Lighting: Your Approach?


I always took manual readings with a Minolta AutoMeter IIIF, yes, I am old. Read around midfield, then from the 20 in to the goal line and then in the end zone. That gave me an idea of what the fall off was from the brightest spots to the darkest. Then I went to manual on the camera and worked with the parameters I knew to be correct. Once the players were on the field I also did some tests to see how the uniforms effected what I had metered. It is always a crap shoot but at least with today's digital cameras you can go to high ISOs and still have decent images. Oh. Shoot RAW so you can open up those darker images as needed.


Oct 03, 2017 at 08:07 PM
PureMichigan
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Metering Under Poor Stadium Lighting: Your Approach?


All helpful, thanks... One of the small adjustments I've made this year to great effect is when it totally dark (save the weak stadium lights) I'm shooting more from the sidelines (vs. the end zone) in the using middle field with the stands/spectators as background.

For some reason, my camera seems to do a better job at the same ISOs when there is a color-rich/variable background vs. shooting into the black depths of space. No idea why but it works for me ...



Oct 04, 2017 at 01:30 PM
shuttlemanfl
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Metering Under Poor Stadium Lighting: Your Approach?


I feel you pain. I look forward to when the high school I cover goes to away games at some of the other stadiums. The lighting is very poor at the home field and the flickering is awful. That is one reason I really like my 7D mark II. Yes it cuts FPS down but I also don’t have to worry about deleting so many hard to fix pictures. Of course this year the school replace all the light bulbs in the current lights and is almost night and day difference (pun intended). According to the photography teacher at the school they double the effective light on the field. Yeah!!! Now if I could just get them to add a third bank of lights on each side....haha...fantasy world.

Sorry a bit off subject. However I did want to say that I bought a ExpoDisc White Balance filter on Amazon over a year ago and it has greatly reduced my heartache in taking pictures at the schools. It might not be perfect but it a a huge help. I just take a shot or two with it on and set the custom white balance to the gray shot. Then I make sure my histogram is lined up where I want it for the exposure part. The funny thing is, I have shot enough at the stadiums that I could just about write down the settings for each field including White Balance and just set it all manually.



Oct 04, 2017 at 11:10 PM
Jeff Self
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Metering Under Poor Stadium Lighting: Your Approach?


Nothing like high school football stadiums to remind most of us that there's a reason the fastest cameras and lenses cost so much! I've only shot one game so far this year and the stadium lighting was bad. Plus, half the game was played at dusk and the lighting wasn't helping much anyway.

I pretty much shoot auto white balance with the flicker setting activated on my D500. But only after the sky is dark and the lights are the only source of light. But I might have to try my ExpoDisc this week. I'm shooting a JV game on Thursday night and then a Varsity game Friday night.



Oct 09, 2017 at 11:23 AM
TopStepPhotography
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Metering Under Poor Stadium Lighting: Your Approach?


Depends on the capture. I shoot in professional sports stadiums, some with and some without decent lighting. Still, pockets of darkness everywhere. For wide shots with crowd, matrix maybe, but for only subjects mid field, again, depending on use, I prefer spot.


Jan 12, 2018 at 10:32 PM





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