More sports shooting

OK, just to prove that I've still got a long way to go with this sports shooting malarkey - below are some images I shot today at my kids school swimming sports.

Joshua's backstroke action. Canon 20D , 70-200mm f2.8L

The swimming sports is held at the aquatic centre - an indoor stadium that isn't exactly set up for great lighting. There aren't that many lights, and what are there are miles away in the roof. No 'natural' lighting whatsoever, so pretty low-light conditions with which to shoot reasonably fast-moving sports.

I shot with the 20D again to give me 5fps, and kept the camera in jpeg mode to give me a good series of bursts (see last post on Reefton Rodeo). Bumping the ISO to 800, and opening up to f2.8, I was still only getting 100th sec shutter speeds! Not really enough to 'freeze' the action in the way I would have liked.

Emily's freestyle action. 20D and 70-200mm f2.8L

Consequently, all the images have a slight blur to them - simply because I couldn't get the shutter speeds up fast enough. A newer camera would have allowed me to boost the ISO another stop, up to 1600, but that would still be cutting it fine with the shutter speed at around 200/250th. Ideally I would have liked a 500th to a1000th, but I just don't think it was going to happen with the lighting I had. Hands and water are blurred, although I've gotten away with it if the faces are 'reasonably' sharp.

Josh going for gold. Canon 20D with 70-200mm f2.8

All-in-all, within the limitations that I had to work with, I got a couple of 'okay' images. Good enough for the family album - but nowhere near good enough to use as portfolio shots - they're just not 'quite' sharp enough. Maybe I'll rob a bank and get myself a new 1DX that I can shoot at 6400 and still get noise-free images! :-)

Ah well. Dreams are free.