I came to seek advice when getting my kit and with excellent help came in €1 under my €600 budget and am now shooting with a Nikon D7000, have so far used a Nikon AF Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8D IF-ED - Two Touch to shoot outdoor field sports and got results I’m really happy with. Also have Nikon AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D and Nikon AF-S DX Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR II, though I think they may not be relevant to my question now.
I plan on taking pictures of an indoor gymnastics show. I’ve been at it last year and expect a similar set up. I’ll be able to move around between acts but will need to pick a spot for each short section. Imagine you’re at a fairly dark circus and you want to take good photos, that’s pretty much where I’ll be.
Open to any suggestions on what I should be trying, settings-wise. Low exposure, otherwise I’ll end up with the subject blown out? Also, can anyone point me toward what would be a similar-ish setting for practice? Taking pictures outside at night? Or, I guess anyone to look at who particularly does lots of this type of thing, or discusses it usefully in a YouTube or anything? I can’t find much at the moment but I suspect that is to do with me not having a good photography type vocabulary to describe what I’m looking for. Over my first three outings so far for outdoor sports, I’ve made adjustments and improved, but this is a one day event, I won’t get an opportunity to look at the results and reflect on what to change before trying again.
Thanks for your time and any suggestions!
If you don’t mind hitting the images in post, you can set the iso to the highest you’re comfortable with, aperture wide open, and then go to the shutter speed you can get, and shoot 1-1 1/3 stop under. Shooting raw, you can recover that in post. I prefer this method over relying on iso noise reduction. I’ve seen some to -2 but it’s a matter of how muddy you’re willing to shoot it.