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?
Just a few interesting details walking around a couple of towns in Germany. In the second one, I was just captured by the setting sunlight in an alley.
We just came back from NE Oregon location scouting Zumwalt Prairie and Enterprise/Joseph area as well.
A few shots from the winter of 2025. The last one was inside of the Acropolis Museum. (Unfortunately, I could get everyone to walk exactly where I wanted them to. hahaha)
9 Comments
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.
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!
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.
I’ll give that a shot next time out. Thanks!
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.
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
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-se…
Thanks, I’ll take a look.
I'm using Neat Image plugin for Photoshop. Maybe it could be helpful.