Monkeymom

Need help on Night Football. I use a Canon EOS REBEL SL1
The photo was at 12800 F5.6 Ss 400

Photo 1


Photo 2

alolewis

Looks like you have good settings for this shot. You need a fast shutter speed so you had to raise the ISO. One option but expensive is get a fast lens, I use a 70-200mm 2.8. Another option is to shoot in raw if you are not already and then lighten in post processing. However, the photos will still be grainy, not much you can do about it. Lighting in high school and in my case, junior college, fields is horrible for photos. I sometimes set the aperture and shutter speed using manual mode and the set auto iso.The photos are good BTW.

jaymatt Loc: Alexandria, Indiana

Nice work here. I have an SL1, and I find that it doesn’t handle high ISO well. To me, that’s about all you can get out of the shot.

CPR Loc: Nature Coast of Florida

ISO is an amplifier so when you raise it up you get noise (not grain, as there is no grain in digital). In sports or photojournalism or any other effort where "Getting the Shot" is important you can raise the ISO and put up with the noise. The faster the lens the less amplification needed. That's why you see those fast monster $10,000 lenses on the sidelines at sports events.

Weddingguy Loc: British Columbia - Canada

Excellent explanation!

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Too high an ISO — reduce to 6400 max.
Too small an aperture — use an f/2.8 or faster aperture lens. If you can afford a FIXED maximum aperture zoom, it's better for sports.
Shutter speed can be reduced slightly in marginal lighting so you can lower the ISO a bit. A monopod and an image stabilized lens help avoid camera shake.

The Canon Rebel SL1/EOS 100D is five years old, and fairly noisy at high ISO. Anything above ISO 800 or so is going to yield visibly reduced quality. https://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Canon/EOS-100D---Measurements

Night football is a niche that requires fast lenses, low noise bodies, monopods, and reasonable shutter speeds (1/250 to 1/500 or faster). If your camera or lens has image stabilization, it will not stop subject motion blur, but it can reduce or eliminate camera shake that is common when panning or reacting quickly to sudden changes in ball direction or player movement.

Some of the pros here will tell you that you need to spend a gazillion bucks on full frame bodies and f/2 300mm lenses. That would be nice, but... I'd rather have a nice, reliable car.

Many of us covered Friday night football in the 1970s using ISO 400 black-and-white films "pushed" in special developers to an "exposure index" of 1280 or 1600 or even 2400. We gave up shadow details for speed. Exposures of 1/125 at f/2.8 were often all we could get in dim high school football stadiums... with 135mm fixed focal length lenses! Grain was like sandpaper. There was no autofocus, so we had to anticipate where the play would go, and pre-focus manually. At least one pro I knew used an 85mm f/1.8 lens and waited for plays that happened near the sideline. In brighter stadiums, he used a 105mm f/2.5 or a 135mm f/2.8. His 200mm f/4 was usually out of the question... locked in the car trunk. We seldom used zooms back then — they were mostly expensive, slow, and mediocre.

My point is that yes, at high ISO, you will get noise (digital equivalent of grain). Your meter may be fooled by bright white uniforms, causing underexposure. OR, the field may be unevenly lit, so if you have a variable aperture zoom lens, you might find that at the long end, the aperture is too small for the shutter speed and ISO in use. Metering off of (and doing a custom white balance with) a Delta-1 18% Gray Card (2-packs are around $10) may give you a more accurate exposure and better color.