Toronto Photography Meetup Group

I'll be doing an indoor soccer shoot tomorrow, and would like to ask if anyone has any tips. I've done it before, but was restricted to just using my 50mm/1.4.

I went and rented the 70-200 2.8IS in preparation for this. Man, this thing is heavy. Never held anything like this before </noob>.

Should I go tripod or hand held?

I'm not sure about the lighting in the venue. It's the toronto soccerplex up at railside/vic park (http://www.torontosoccerplex.com/). Has anyone shot there before? The pics on the site look nicely lit, but might be deceiving.

I'm seriously considering lugging my strobe up there to bounce off the ceiling if lighting is poor. Would that work? Drawback is the 1/200 max sync speed. Should I bother? I'm going to test it tonight, but would using the PC cord give faster sync speeds?

For sports, you can't beat the flexibility of either hand holding or monopod esp with a fast paced sport like soccer. Crank up the ISO, shoot wide open if you have to and have fun. Try not to get too addicted to the 70-200 f2.8IS!

Monopod the 70-200.

your back and feet will thank you.

Crank up the ISO, check your white balance and do a test shot to check the exposure settings with a shutter speed fast enough to stop the action or get the motion blur you want then set your camera to manual with the aperture/shutter settings.

Post mortem!

The good: 70-200 F/2.8IS. Awesome lens. Carlton, you're right. I just might get addicted to this thing. My arms are a little tired now though because I did a whole 2 hours of it handheld.

The bad: Pretty bad lighting. Had to use ISO 3200 for most of it, and white balance was all over the place. I swear, within a 10 feet of space, the WB went from tungsten to flourescent. I didn't have time to figure out why that was though, and so will have to fix during post.

Not 100% happy with my results as I feel I did better in the past, but I'll take what I can get.


(Straight conversion from RAW, no processing done yet)