I recently attended my high school's swim meet in order to take some shots for our yearbook, but I had never taken pictures of swimmers before. Needless to say, most of the pictures were either blurry or grainy, or a combination of both. I uploaded most of them so that you can see what I'm talking about. I'm wondering if anyone has any tips for taking pictures of swimmers (and divers). I thought that setting the ISO to 1600 would eliminate blur, but the shots turned out too grainy. I had my Nikon D70 on shutter priority with the speed at 1/500 for most of the time. What's the ideal ISO/shutter speed/aperture combination for photographing events like this? Also, any tips of interesting angles to take pictures from?
In my understanding it's "Noise" not "Grain", but I understand what you mean. High ISO settings will have alot of Noise in them. Depending on your camera, I think you're best to keep the ISO under 800 if possible. Blur, It's clear that you had problems with motion Blur. The only way around this is very fast shutter speeds, 1/500 is just not fast enough. If you want fast shutter speeds, then you need alot of light. To stop action indoor, without proper lighting, you will need F2.8 . Low light + Low ISO + Fast Shutter speeds = Wide Aperture But be warned, this is purely a theoretical look at things. I have no experience at all.
a good way to reduce noise is to shoot in raw and overexpose as much as possible, then bring it down in the raw converter. using this technique it's possible to take ISO1600 pics that look almost as good as ISO400-800 pics - depending on the scene. noise isn;t really an issue with sports pics - the aim is to campture the energy and action - not to take a technically impressove shot.
The problem is, to overexpose you need to decrease the shutter speed (assuming everything else is maxxed). Which is obviously not ideal.
Bad idea.... you'll just get bombed out highlights, and in order to over-expose, even if the technique did work, you'd need slower shutter speeds, which would defeat the purpose.. this guy wants faster shutter speeds. The only real solution is to use the fastest ISO you can, and the fastest lens you can. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
saying that though, 1/500 should be plenty fast enough to freeze the swimmers. are you panning at all? surely they don't even move that quickly. confused [edit] after actually looking at the gallery they don't seem to have any motion blur.
