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Tom Baptiste's picture
Tom Baptiste

High ISO help with slower lens

I’ve been shooting our boys’ games with a Nikon 70-300 f4-5.6 on a d7500 and getting into the 20,000 ISO range at times. Any thoughts on cleaning these up, or how much noise is acceptable in night sports? Any other advice, looking at these?

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9 Comments
Paul FIlios's picture
Paul FIlios

These shots look pretty good. Night sports under high school lights are tough. They tend to be both not very bright, and inconsistent across the field. I shoot with the aperture wide open and the shutter speed as low as I can get and still minimize motion blur. Usually 1/800 sec, but if the lights are particularly bad sometimes at 1/500 sec. Then set ISO to auto. This usually give consistent exposure even as the players go in and out of bright spots on the field. The noise reduction sliders in Lightroom are OK, I've used DeNoise AI from Topaz Labs to clean up some of the worst shots.

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Tom Baptiste's picture
Tom Baptiste Paul FIlios

Thanks, I should have been more specific. I shoot wide open as possible for the focal length and stick with 1/1000-1/1600 and auto ISO. I’ll give Topaz a shot. Been just using ACR and photoshop. Thanks for the feedback!

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Matthew Lacy's picture
Matthew Lacy Tom Baptiste

I find that one can get perfectly crisp photos at 1/800 or even sometimes at 1/640. That would help your lighting situation immensely.

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Tom Baptiste's picture
Tom Baptiste Matthew Lacy

I’ll give that a shot next time out. Thanks!

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Matthew Lacy's picture
Matthew Lacy

your shots are good to start with. I recently did a game with what looks like very similar conditions. I was shooting at f/2.8, but I still had some noise issues. I did find that 90% of the time, a conversion to b/w helped. I have a few shots in my portfolio, which you can check out for ideas.

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Tom Baptiste's picture
Tom Baptiste Matthew Lacy

Thanks Matthew, I’ll try out black and white. Working on an f2.8 but the kids will probably have graduated by then! Thanks a lot for your help

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Matthew Lacy's picture
Matthew Lacy Tom Baptiste

I appreciate you sharing the photos. I shot off of that exact same lens as you for two years and never got anything like what you have. Some of the best ones I ever took with the 70-300 mm are in a comment in this post.

https://fstoppers.com/groups/2328/sports-photography/410498/football-season

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Tom Baptiste's picture
Tom Baptiste Matthew Lacy

Thanks, I’ll take a look.

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Dawid Gaszynski's picture
Dawid Gaszynski

I'm using Neat Image plugin for Photoshop. Maybe it could be helpful.

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