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CHAPTER
NIGHT AND LOW-LIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY / Shooting Sports

Outdoor lighting

Many sports, ranging from American high school

football to little league to soccer or rugby, are

played outdoors in the evenings under artificial

lights. Those lights look very bright, especially

against a darkening sky, but when you start to

measure the light, you will find the levels to be

lower than you expect.

The lighting outdoors is also different because

instead of coming from directly above, it comes

from the side of the venue and can cause shadows

to fall across the field. Because the lights are

around the field and not over it, there are places

where the light is brighter than others. This

change is not huge, but it can cause slight dis-

crepancies in the exposure. For these situations,

using the shutter priority mode enables you to

keep the shutter speed high enough to freeze the

action and still make sure that any differences in

the light are accounted for. In these cases, I usu-

ally use a spot-metering mode so that the black

night sky backgrounds are not taken into consid-

eration when determining the exposure. Even the

stands full of fans can be considered dark back-

grounds and need to be avoided.

Because all the light is coming from the same

type of light, even if it does vary in intensity, you

can either let the camera pick the white balance

by using the Auto setting or create a custom

white balance setting.

Freezing the Action

The goal is to freeze a moment in time, that split

second that sums up the whole game — the

moment the receiver catches the ball or dives

over the goal line for a touchdown, the moment

not distracting to the players or the fans. These
photographers must really be able to time their
shots carefully because the flashes need time to
recharge between firing and can’t just be used
continuously. In reality, unless you get permission
to try this at the local gym, you will not be work-
ing with this lighting, but just know that it is
out there.

ABOUT THIS PHOTO My nephew learning the ins and outs of
basketball at the local recreation center. He is lit by both the ceiling
lights and the light coming in through the open door. As he dribbled up
and down the court, the exposure changed. Taken at 1/320 second, f/2.8,
and ISO 500.

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