Indoor Volleyball.

[Raskill]

I've been asked to take some shots at an indoor volleyball comp this weekend and was wondering if anyone could help me with the settings.

From what I can figure out myself, the ideal shutter speed will be enough to capture the ball sharply, if that can be achieved, any player movements should be sharp also. I was planning to use shutter priority and let the camera sort the rest out. Is this advisable?

I'll be shooting with a sigma 70 - 200mm F/2.8, which I'm hoping will give me the zoom I need, without having to resort to a 2x TC (and lose light). For players serving, should I use autofocus or pre focus and hope for the best? The lens is pretty quick to focus.

The court area is pretty bright with intense halogen lighting and skylights with white walls. Any ideas what ISO I should use, or just stick with auto?

Sorry to ask so many questions, but I should be able to sell a few and also the local paper has asked for images.

Anyone got experience shooting indoor sports?

Hope someone out there can help. Thanks!!!

[Killakoala]

After having just finished a Netball, AFL, Soccer and Cricket assignment this weekend gone, which was my first sports photo shoot, i can say that it is not easy photographing fast moving sports with a D70. (Except cricket, which was easy, even with my 500mm reflex)

For the Netball, which was indoors under flouros and skylights i used an 85mm 1.4 as i don't have an 80-200 or 70-200, which i would have used preferably.

There should be plenty of light so you should use ISO 200, which i reckon should be used 99% of the time anyway.

If you are adept at focussing manually, then opt for that. I found focussing on a fast moving subject very difficult and the speed of the camera/lens did not help much at all.

I can't upload any photos so i can't show you examples. Sorry.

Good luck and enjoy the experience.

[Glen]

Raskill, I would get there early and do a few test shots to check lighting out. Slightly different to Steve, I would probably bump the ISO up if I thought the shutter speed was down due to low light. I (others would choose differently) would probably shoot in aperture mode shoosing the minimum aperture to get the dof you want, then choose an acceptable noise ISO then hope shutter speed was ok. Eg for an individual I may choose f3.5, to get the whole court maybe f8, then I would set theminimum ISO I could live with. At f8 you may need ISO 800 or 1600 to get an acceptable shutter speed. At f3.5 it will be less.

Others may make other choices and probably will.

[Raskill]

Thanks for the info guys. I am obviously keen to avoid using the flash during game time, but figure during warm up etc, it wouldn't be to bad.

I think I'll definetly do a recce before hand and figure some decent settings out. Hopefully I'll have some decent examples to post come Sunday/Monday.

If not, it was all the lenses fault