shooting hs football tonight

[santer36]

hi everyone. i am doing my first high school football game tonight. only question i have is what to expect to

set my white balance on? i wish i had an expo disc but don't. i hear they work wonders for custom settings. so

with stadium lights i know there are different kinds but anyone have any idea about 2 or three different types of

lights i may incounter. i can afford to play around a little at first but i was looking at what setting i should

try first. thanks guys.

[Leroy_Photography]

Since I shoot in JPG for football, I have settled on Auto. If you shoot in RAW, however, you can probably play around with it a bit during post-processing and determine what works best for you.

[emmett_ward]

Just shoot in RAW and don't worry about it.

[santer36]

normally i would just do raw. but i am loading all the images to an ftp site for the web design team to edit them. i was going to shoot jpeg to make it easier for them.

[Leroy_Photography]

I agree with Emmett, "Just shoot in RAW." If your camera will allow you to shoot in RAW without dragging, do it. Mine, however, won't. I've had this discussion over and over again AND have tried it over and over again. Even with a new faster lens and new camera, when I shoot in RAW (for night time football ONLY), I MISS SHOTS using continuous shooting. I can't, therefor I don't.

[dave_hoffmann]

Shoot a gray card

[santer36]

i have an XTI with 70-200 2.8 IS and 17-55 2.8 IS. i can shoot in raw, just trying to make it easier for the editor. i guess i could shoot in raw and convert myself then just send the jpegs to the FTP site.

[tgood]

I agree about shooting raw and then converting. Stadium lights have a tendancy to change color continously. So unless you shoot a shutter speed 1/60 or 1/30 (a bit slow huh?), white cards may not be effective. However, you'd be well advised to shoot a white card anyway. If you luck out it will work without post-processing the color, or could be a good starting point when you do need to post process.

 

If your camera has the ability, you might even shoot RAW and JPEG simultaneously. If all looks good on the JPEG, then you won't need to post-process, but the RAW versions are there just in case.

[2yellowdogs]

Shooting raw is great if your camera has a large enough buffer. But I tend to shoot jpeg anyway. The first reason is write

speed and the second is frames per media card. I tend to shoot a lot of images during a game and would have to have an

awful lot of media to accommodate 1500 to 2000 RAW images.<div></div>

[2yellowdogs]

Post cut off a paragraph:

 

Stadium lights *do* shift. No matter how you set your WB, you'll get variations. I've tried both ways, but tend to shoot

using auto WB (D300). Auto is good enough to keep the number of 'off' images to a minimum and they don't need drastic

correction.