ISO 3200
Mar 20th, 2007 by John Setzler
Patrick Johnson - St. Stephens
Originally uploaded by John Setzler.
I did a little bit of experimental work on a baseball assignment tonight. I do have a minor advantage with light at the moment because we started daylight savings time a few weeks early. The first few weeks of high school baseball season is always difficult though. Game time is 7pm and the light is still falling off quite rapidly at that time. I can’t use a flash, so I have to push the camera to its extremes. This particular photo was shot during the first inning while I still had a little usable light left. I put the 1.4x teleconverter on the 70-200 f/2.8 and shot through the fence. In aperture priority mode, the shutter speed I got for this photo was 1/800″ @ f/4. It cleaned up well enough with the help of Noise Ninja, but the result is actually usable.
As the light continued to diminish, the ISO 3200 shots were quite ugly with noise. I don’t think I would be able to make reasonable use of those. The stadium light at this field allowed me to shoot at about 1/160″ or 1/200″ at f/2.8 @ ISO 3200… hardly usable for sports action.
The good news is that days will continue to get longer for quite a while. I would have had more light at the start of this game, but clouds were rolling in about 20 minutes before game time.