Indoor Sports Photography

Indoor sports photography shooting isn’t easy, it’s much harder to get high shutter speeds in a dark venue then it is to shoot outside on a sunny baseball or football field.

When shooting in a darker indoor venue, you will need to maximize the available ambient light. Sports photographers inside NBA stadiums have wireless flashes that hang from above the court. That helps them shoot with faster shutter speeds, but still get more light on their subjects to prevent under exposure of their images.

a slightly under exposed indoor photo

Unfortunately, you will likely not have the same access or capabilities at a professional or amateur venue. So your best results will be achieved by ensuring you have high shutter speeds and proper exposure. Under exposure indoors will lead to noisy images, while proper exposure will lead to highly usable images.

If shooting in a school gym, you will likely need to shoot with an ISO of 800 or 1600 depending on the type of lighting they have. Also because of the tricky nature of school lighting, I recommend shooting in RAW so that you can adjust the white balance at a later time.

Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/1000) Aperture: F2.8 ISO: 800

In school venues, use a monopod to balance your lens and camera and assist in stabilizing your shots.

If shooting a hockey game, you will likely find that you are metering while appearing accurate has actually under exposed your photos. This is because shooting through Plexiglas will result in an under exposed image. My advice is to over expose the image 1/3 or 1/2 a stop in order to reduce noise. It would be better to use a higher ISO, then to under expose your image in order to get a fast shutter speed.