Photography Blog: Daytime High School Soccer

Friday, October 11, 2013

Daytime High School Soccer

All the games I've shot so far this year have been under the lights. The constant lighting makes it easy to set a manual exposure and not worry about it the rest of the evening. Yesterday, however, I was shooting a late afternoon game on an overcast day. The changing light meant that I needed to use an auto exposure setting but even though it was overcast I was able to use lower ISO settings and higher shutter speeds than under the lights.

Backgrounds can be more distracting during the day as the light falloff at night renders most of the background too dark to be distracting. Accordingly, a wide aperture is needed to blur the background. I find that anything slower than f/2.8 results in too great a depth of field and the shots look like they were taken with a point and shoot camera.

So, you need f/2.8 under the lights to get a fast enough shutter speed to stop the action at an acceptable ISO setting and you need f/2.8 during the day to isolate backgrounds. I used various ISO settings so as to keep the shutter speeds generally between 1/1000 and 1/3000 a second. Slower than 1/1000 and a higher ISO was needed and faster than 1/3000 and I could use a lower ISO for better image quality. There are ways to set aperture and shutter speed manually and have an auto ISO setting to adjust the exposure but I haven't played around with that as yet.

All images were made with an EOS 7D and the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens.