Nighttime Sports With A Slow Lens

I hadn't been planning any nighttime sports shooting this year, or last for that matter, because I really don't have lenses long enough for field sports that are fast enough for the required shutter speed at ISO levels that aren't ridiculously high.

A lens with an f/2.8 maximum aperture and a 70-200mm lens with a crop sensor body or a longer zoom with a full frame body are the minimum recommended gear for such work. My only lens longer than 105mm at this point is my 70-300mm f/4-5.6 zoom. This means that at the longer end of the zoom I'm getting two stops, or four times, less light than an f/2.8 lens.

After watching the first half of Hartwick Women's Soccer from the sidelines sans camera, I decided at halftime to go out to the car and see what I could do. Full frame cameras have much better image quality at high ISO settings than crop sensor bodies due to their lower noise levels so I thought maybe I could get the ISO high enough for fast enough shutter speeds.

This all depends on the light level of the field, of course. Three years ago I shot a match at a poorly lit field which I wrote about here. Exposure settings on that occasion were f/2.8, 1/750th second at ISO 4000. I was using a crop sensor 7D so that was pushing the ISO. The other night, I was stuck with a two stop slower aperture of f/5.6 and settled on a shutter speed of 1/500th second. ISO needed was 6400. But, I was using a 5D Mark III so the noise level was much better.

The two sets of RAW files were very similar, mostly underexposed but able to be brightened in processing. The 5DIII files were much less noisy. If you do the exposure math, the field the other night was about one EV more brightly lit than the field three years ago.

Here are some samples from the match which Hartwick won 2-0, securing their place in the Empire 8 playoffs next weekend.