Ever taken action photos in poor light and had poor results? At some point, we all have!
But what if I told you there are things you can do to make sure you give yourself the very best chance of taking a sharp photo every time in low light?
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Taking sharp photos in low light can be a challenge. You can very easily find yourself with a noisy image, or one in which the subject is blurred. It can be frustrating, demoralising and maybe even put you off shooting night-time events or games full stop. And that’s not good.
However, the good news is that these are fairly easy to fix but the difficulty in doing so can be really ramped up when you’re shooting action sports in challenging conditions. Also, let’s not beat around the bush, the camera you have will impact this – if you’re shooting on a modern five-thousand dollar camera, you’re probably going to find it deals with noise and produces much better images than if you’re on an older body, maybe a consumer level camera.
Don’t worry though – in this video we will look at some tips and tricks that will put you in with the best chance of shooting low light images that you’re proud of. So, let’s jump in.
- Shoot in manual
My advice here what be to get your camera into full manual mode. Get to grip with your settings and tweak them until it looks as good as it’s going to get when you are reviewing images on the rear screen.
In many, but not all, low light situations, lighting will be pretty constant – think of a gym for basketball, or a tennis court under floodlights. So, you don’t need to rely on shutter priority because it’s literally easier to go set your shutter and everything else manually.
Now, in some scenarios the light may be changing – at lots of football grounds I have shot at, the floodlights are different around the pitch. Some areas of the pitch are darker than others. In instances like this, you may want to flick to shutter priority and set that shutter as low as you can get away with, however, I probably would stick to manual.
- Shoot RAW
Now for shooting football, I rarely shoot in RAW. A few reasons for this that I’ll try not to bore you with, but the buffering of writing a burst of images to the memory card and then the space required to transfer them to my laptop for live edits and wiring during the game just make it a cluinky process.
However, for some night-time matches I will use RAW. If I was shooting in a gym or another low light situation, I’d also want to shoot RAW whenever possible and you should too.
Shooting in RAW means that you can do so much more with the image in post processing. Even if you have to under-expose your image due to camera capabilities and light levels, you can rescue so much more by dragging that exposure up with a RAW image. Using a JPEG for the same thing is going to get very messy and noisy very fast.
So, get in Manual Mode and turn the image type to RAW – or RAW and JPEG, if you prefer.
- Start with your shutter speed
In order to get a nice sharp image in low light, you’re going to need to do the same thing that you’d do when shooting action in any other scenario – crank that shutter speed up. However, in low light situations, this becomes problematic. The higher the shutter speed, the less light that reaches the sensor and thus the darker your image is.
So, it’s about getting the balance right and your environment very much influences this. I would ordinarily see start a football game at 1/1000 and try to raise it higher, maybe 1600/1 or 2000/1. However, in really low light, I have to bring it down the other way.
Try 1/800 and then 1/640. Generally speaking the lowest I’d want to go is 1/500 – less than that and with a lot of action sports you can start to introduce motion blur, particularly if the action is up close to you.
So, if it’s really dark, maybe take your shutter straight to 1/500 and then let’s focus on your aperture.
- Aperture / f number
Okay, so let’s not have a full-on exposure triangle lesson here, but your aperture is denoted by an f number. The lower the f number, the larger the aperture and so the more light that is reaching the sensor. More light = higher exposure.
Now, with action sports, you ideally should have the fastest glass possible. You need really to get down to f2.8 here – that’s going to give you a lovely depth of field and some bokeh, but crucially it lets more light in to help with the exposure and partly compensate for the fast shutter.
If you don’t have quick glass, perhaps you’re working with a higher f number, just take it as low as possible and use that as you’re starting point.
- Move that ISO up
The final setting you will tweak to introduce more light into your image is the I-S-O. Some people pronounce it ISO, myself included. Anyway, the higher the ISO, the more sensitive your sensor becomes to light, meaning the brighter or more exposed your image becomes. Now, some cameras can introduce A LOT of noise with high ISOs, so its not a case of just taking this as high as possible – you again need to review the images you’re taking in the back of the camera and try to find a balance that hits everything right.
Fast enough shutter for a sharp subject. Aperture wide enough to allow light in and get a nice depth of field. ISO high enough to introduce enough light without damaging the image too much.
- Noise reduction in post
Okay, finally let’s talk about once you have taken your image. By shooting in RAW, you’re going to be able to do much more with the image in Photoshop or Lightroom to bring that exposure up further or maybe bring out the detail a little more.
If your camera has introduced a lot of noise, you can experiment with the noise reduction tools in PS/LR. The luminance slider is great for smoothing out the image and taking some noise out, but beware if you go too far your image will very quickly look weird. People will look like plastic dolls, for example. So, use it sparingly!
So, there we go, I hope that helps next time you head out to shoot some low light photography. Let me know if you have any other tips in the comments below and I’ll see you on the next video!
