I'm trying to tell you. Com'on, people are smart here and people
can take normal assumptions such as follows well:
I'm not doubting that anyone in here is smart. Hey, you managed to come up with a thousand dollars that was SO extra that you were able to spend it on a camera; that puts you in maybe the top 3% of the world's population for applied smarts. But all smart people don't know the same things, and I don't think most of the assumptions are so normal...
1. I'm not a frail old man who shivers from left to right with
camera shake. if I am, I WILL post that.
Well, I hope I haven't offended you by sounding as if I thought you were a frail old man. But this is something that varries HUGELY between different people ... and even the same person in different settings. I like espresso, and I like my 300 mm ( = 480 mm EFL ) lens. When I use it to photograph birds on the coast of Puget Sound, where it's really, really cold and windy, I need
substantially faster shutter speeds ( because I'm shivering ) to get a sharp picture than I do shooting candids downtown.
If I simply told you "... if you shoot faster than 1/200th sec you'll get sharp pics ..." I'd be lieing to you. You might wind up with sharp pictures anyway, and you might not. Imagine if I told you some arbitrary number and it steered you wrong, messed up all your shooting that night, and cost you any keepers!!
You probably wouldn't be wasting your time if you shot a few pics of your favorite poster, bookshelf, or whatever, at different shutter speeds to see where your limits are.
3. I KNOW that tripod is good and will create sharp image and BASED
on my initial question, I DID state that. I just don't want to
drag heavy equipment if I don't need to.
Then there's 75% of your answer!! The other 25% is how well you're able to hand-hold ( Daniella is a queen here ), and what kind of sharpness you're comfortable with. If you don't enjoy working from a tripod and you can manage to pull good photos out of your gear without one, than nothing else needs to be said!
But since we're
specifically talking about gymnastics, a tripod could ( psychologically ) do more harm than good. Maybe you want photos of gymnists doing insane splits that I would never be able to pull off, but maybe you want to freeze a gymnist mid-flip? In the latter case, you'll still need a very fast shutter, which renders the tripod's advantage useless.
If you can state the above answers like you did, I will guarantee
that people will respect you at least 200% more than they normally
would and even marvel at your ability to think it so thoroughly
through. If that is too long an answer for you and you don't wish
to type it all out, then it is better to not to answer at all. I'm
serious!
Honestly, I just poke my head in here to help. I'm not all that interested in earning peoples' respect until I know them on a more personal level. So much gets lost in translation, idea to text to idea, that the respect of someone I know in a flesh-and-blood sense means a lot more to me than someone who may well completely misunderstand me. But I've learned a GREAT DEAL from the very helpful people around here, and I'm trying to give some of that back. I'd rather share some meaningful knowledge than gain respect.
( My photos are a different story, though; I think they can actually
earn respect without having to present them on paper. )
But I
guarentee that if I had just said "shoot at 1/200 and you'll be fine" and then it didn't work out, you would have lost 10,000% more respect for me than from any thoughts or suggestions I could share on how photography works.
This is the part I'm most interested with. I have no experience
with this and there can only be some simple range (such as
between 1/100 and 1/500) that I hope someone with experience can
give pointers to me at.
If your subject is moving, I don't think 1/100 will be fast enough by any means. I would imagine 1/500 would be plenty in most situations, but this isn't something I have much experience with. I
do know 1/100 and 1/500 is about 2.5 stops away, though, and if you're
able to get away with a slower speed, you could put those stops into your ISO for less noise, or your aperture for a sharper lens and more DOF.
Exactly what shutter speed is fast enough depends on too many things to even guess at, but I would approach this in RAW mode at ISO 1600, with a big aperture lens. For starters, then adjust my settings after a few pictures. If you have a lens that's sharp wide-open this is fantastic, but if not, I think you get better photo quality closing the lens down a stop than you would reducing the ISO by that same stop. Lenses that are popular in this type of photography are usually the sharp, fast primes, like the 85/1.8 and 100 or 135 f/2.
This article explains shutter speeds and sharpness; it has a very cool section on how the
direction of movement affects all of this:
http://megapixel.net/html/issueindex.php?lang=en
You might also find this site (
http://www.wlcastleman.com/ ) useful, as the man reviews several lenses and cameras specifically for their suitability to gynmastic shooting, and the DOF/speed issues relating to this type of photography. You also might want to look around photo.net for more useful info.
