The New Champion (Of Darkness)
My forced explorations of poorly lit sports venues has a new champion.
The local aquatic centre is impressive, amazing even. A modern, fully appointed pool complex sitting on top of the hill that dominates the city, it has it all. Views, facilities, good patronage and versatility.
The lighting though, can be truly rubbish.
During the day the treated glass panels let in some light, but it tends to be half and half, the artificial light then adding a sickly pall. Good results can be had, but it is on the outside edge of workable.
Even an F4 lens works in mixed daylight.
I assume there is a reason, most likely to do with safety, but the centre of the pool has no overheads. The wings are fine, sets of paired down lights running down both long sides, but the middle is in shadow.
Worse than that, the lights had a tendency to back-light players close to the goals, because the row of lights started about ten feet up the side and miss the ends.
This is the light to my eye. ISO 6400, 1/500th at f2.8.
Lightened to something printable, but suffering poor colour and some nasty, blotchy noise.
About as ugly as I will tolerate and only for news print or small web reproduction. Even as a M43 shooter, I am not used to this. M43 tends to give you sharpness and noise, something de-noising can deal with. From tests I ran last year, the D750 Nikon I was issued was no better, trading off slightly better noise control for lower sharpness.
On the wings, the light level was acceptable even if the colour and contrast is poor, so basically what I expected.
Fine for most uses. Exposing for this half of the space was a numbers game I could win.
Most attacks came down the wings, so all good, but I found myself chasing the action into the middle, where even the players said it was hard to tell the difference between the dark green and maroon team vests.
At 1/350th, this sort of shot is fine.
Options?
Drop the shutter speed to 1/350th, which is pushing it for action, but ok for semi static shots. This means shooting more, then sifting through to find the good ones.
Push the ISO to 12800, which probably would have been a good idea in hindsight because I know the noise in a well exposed 12800 file is better than an under exposed 6400 one. This is the trick to low light work, don’t under expose.
Use a faster lens. Not knowing the pool size used (8 lane 50m potentially, but only 25m was used on the night), I took my 40-150 f2.8 and 300, but as it turned out the 75mm would have been better.
The problem though is walking from a cold evening into a humid environment and I had a job right before so no time to acclimatise my gear. The 75mm is not weather sealed, so can be a fogging nightmare, the only flaw of an otherwise perfect lens.
Use the S5 and crop like hell. I am thinking I need to use this dual ISO camera more when I don’t know what I am going into, which may lead to a longer lens (the 85mm f1.8 could do a lot of indoor sports).
Add light. Flash used to be the only answer and still can be sometimes. Not sure it was cosher in this case though.
Get one of the new breed, like the OM-1, GH6 etc, possibly a G9 mk2 when released. These all seem to offer a stop or more high ISO performance. This was the one area swinging me towards the GH6 at Christmas.
Do what I did and suck up the fact that some files will be iffy for fine art purposes, but fine for the paper.
This is fine I guess, but we have a new champion in a less than desirable space. As you can see, the background is considerably lighter.
M43 does lag behind full frame in this area, which makes sense, but not usually by as much as you would suppose and I say this from using a kit that does not have the absolute top dogs in the class. Usually the lens advantage can bridge the gap. even get a little ahead, but sometimes a perfect storm of circumstances does conspire to fight your best efforts.
Looking at this from a whole other perspective, noise has lately become the un-tolerated enemy. A bit of noise is often invisible in print, even more so on line, but it seems standards are shifting to “no noise, perfect colour, smooth and sharp always” regardless of ISO, which for any photographer with ten years or more of working memory seems like an unrealistic ask.
Personnally I have lived through the ISO 100 slide film, 400 colour and 1600 mono negative film, ISO 1600, then 6400, now 12,800 digital barriers, so this is just another stage in the process.