2.10 Nighttime Sports

For shooting sports like football or basketball games that are illuminated by bright stadium lights, don’t use auto exposure mode since the black sky or the bright stadium lights can often throw the exposure meter off. Instead, do the following:

• Use ISO 6400 (or even higher if it’s really dark, although higher settings will result in noisier pictures).
• Use Aperture Priority Exposure mode, and open up the lens all the way. (This ensures the fastest shutter speed.) Then meter off a patch of illuminated dirt, pavement, or grass. Ideally this should give you a shutter speed of 1/125^th of a second.
• Set White Balance to Incandescent or Fluorescent (depending on whether the stadium lights are tungsten or Mercury Vapor lamps).
• If all the action will be roughly the same distance away, focus-lock on where the action will be and put the camera into Manual Focus mode.

Anticipate the action and Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!