My Youth Sports Photography Journey

When my kids were hitting youth sports in a serious way at about the turn of the century, I was the dad shooting with a little Canon point-and-shoot camera. The photographs were really hard to shoot. Most of the photos were completely unusable. The unpredictable 2-second shutter delay made me miss most of the action, and when I did manage to catch the action, it was BLURRY, due to the long shutter speeds required by the little point-and-shoot. That’s when I bought a Nikon D70.

The Nikon D70 was a huge upgrade. The shutter release was instantaneous if I turned on AF-C mode. Though AF-C mode leaves many photos out of focus, there were still a lot that had great focus. I was happy, but there were challenges. There isn’t much light in most gyms, and even well-lit gyms have indoor lighting levels, making it hard to get blur-free images. The kit lens was limited to f/5.6 on the long end and the highest ISO was 1600 and noisy. With that combination, the fastest shutter speeds were about 60ms, which isn’t fast enough to freeze the motion. The photos were usable, but the 1600 ISO left the images with blurry hands, feet, heads, basketballs, volleyballs, anything that is moving.

The next step was to move beyond the kit lens to get a wider aperture, which would allow faster shutter speeds with a decent exposure. I bought a Tamron 28-70f/2.8 which I still use today as my short zoom, but it turned out that f/2.8 still wasn’t wasn’t wide enough. I was getting shutter speeds of about 100ms, and this was still pretty blurry.

Next, I bought a Nikon 50mm f/1.8. When I shot at f/2.0 with 1600 ISO I could get shutter speeds over 250ms, which seems to be a threshold. When I got the shutter speed up to 250, hands, feet, basketballs, heads, and things that didn’t move super fast looked sharp. At 250ms, only fast-moving baseballs, bats, volleyball spikes, and similar things are blurry, but it looks cool. Fast-moving objects look fast when they are blurry. I like 250ms for shooting youth sports.

This combination with the Nikon D70 with a prime Nikon 50mm lens at f/2.0 and 1600 ISO my go-to kit for a few years. I mainly sat on the baseline of basketball games, and beside the net at volleyball games. These are prime spots. Be sure to be nice to the referee and be relatively quiet. When you are that close to the referee, they might interpret your yelling to be something other than simple cheering.

While I was getting great youth sports photographs with my D70 and 50 prime, the images were very noisy. This is when I started looking for software noise reduction. Fortunately, at that time, there were a few low light noise reduction software tools that worked increasingly well. Nikon Capture software had the best noise reduction when applied to RAW images. The luminance noise correction in today’s Adobe Lightroom is hard to beat.

I also needed to shoot baseball and football, which are usually outdoors, which is completely different. There is usually a lot of light, but most if the action is far far away. I had a Tamron 70-300 lens, and I got a lot of usable images, but the images weren’t very sharp, and when light was low, the F/5.6 aperture on the long end, left me with blurry images again, so I bought a Nikon 70-200VR, which cost more than everything else put together, but is great. It is still my best outdoor lens. My best images seemed to come from aperture F/4, which isolates the subject pretty well, but allows enough light for great captures.

Still writing article.. but need to take a break Next… the Nikon D300