Indoor Lowlight sports problems

John_A_G wrote:

Sometimes a histogram is useful and sometimes not so much. This is not landscape or portrait photography. The truth is - in many sports shooting situations the dynamic range of the shot is greater than what the camera can achieve. So, as a photographer you have to decide what part of the photo is most important. Faces are more important than ice. If you get the faces looking good, no one cares about blown highlights in the ice. Right now, as a novice. you don't yet appreciate the importance of faces in your sports shots. You will.

There are multiple factors at play:
1) 1/320 is too slow.

2) You should use single focus point only - I can't remember how many focus points on your camera are high precision. You only want to use a focus point that is high precision. I think that's center point only

3) If your subject isn't filling 3/4 of the vertical frame - you're not framing tightly enough and you can expect focus errors

4) technique - you have to give the focus system a chance to acquire your subject. In AI-Servo the camera will let you take a shot before focus is achieved. So, track your subject for a second before firing.

5) Even with all of the above, the focus system isn't perfect. Take 3-4 shot bursts. You'll likely find that 1 or 2 of the shots are sharper than the others.

You need to frame more tightly. That's the first step to getting better. The action needs to fill the frame.

Also, lots of people give sports shooting advice. Vast majority of those people don't actually shoot sports. Of those that do, a good majority do it poorly. If you want to get better you want to start looking at photos from, and getting advice from those people that do it well. Hockey is a sport I don't shoot - but I shoot a lot of other indoor sports. My advice so far is pretty basic. If you really want to get better, start asking questions and looking at shots from the people that do it well. Here's a post by someone that does it well:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1053&message=40619484

You may not have the gear the above poster does - but the types of shots and framing should be a goal. You'll also start to see why faces are so important.

Don't ignore people in other camera systems. You'll get much better advice/help from Nikon or Sony shooters that shoot hockey well than 100 canon people that don't shoot at all or don't do it well.