Sports photography with NX1000

I’ve been using my NX1000 with the 50-200mm lens to take photos of the kids football matches – lots of fast movement! I’ve had reasonable success but would appreciate some advice on the best mode and settings to have the camera on - I've read conflicting advice online. At the moment, light has been pretty good in the early autumn sun.

Any advice really appreciated.

I’ve been using my NX1000 with the 50-200mm lens to take photos of the kids football matches – lots of fast movement! I’ve had reasonable success but would appreciate some advice on the best mode and settings to have the camera on - I've read conflicting advice online. At the moment, light has been pretty good in the early autumn sun.

Any advice really appreciated.

I would shoot in shutter priority mode and ensure a high shutter speed of at least 1/500.
Burst mode is so useful when shooting this kind of action.
Also, I would be careful not to zoom in too much as you risk losing bits of the action as the ball moves quickly. Instead crop in later.

50-200 is pretty good at the near end and you should be comfortable in shooting action in the 50-100 range if you are on the border of the field.

I will set to manual with smallest aperture and 1/500 or 1/1000 of speed, with is in auto to manage exposure.

If you need to go over 150mm i will suggest you to stop down to f6.3 and enjoy sharpness.

If you will be using burst i may also suggest you to switch to jpg and an Ultra1 SD.

Thank you both for the replies.

On my last shoot I did actually have it on M with the settings you suggest (which gave me better results than before).

One thing I should do is be less concerned about getting the perfect framed shot because as you say, I can crop later.

One point on burst mode - I thought this produced a lower quality image which is why I haven't really used it.

Burst mode produces 5MP images, but the bad thing is they are awful - full of jaggies and moire. Continuous High is better choice (8 fps is quite sufficient, in classical DSLRs you would have to shell out for big guns to get faster than that).

The problem is that write times on NX1000 are very long, especially for RAW+JPEG (~30s for buffer to clear). When I'm shooting with 50-200mm, especially at the long end, here's what I do:

1. Use 10M images - this lens at 200mm is not actually producing 20MP worth of images anyway (same goes for any consumer zoom at far end) - write times are almost halved (JPEG only though)

2. AF-S and pre-focus on something and wait for action to come to focus zone - not ideal, but AF-C is a joke on samsung cameras prior to NX1/NX500. This was they way to shoot in MF days as well and with a bit of practice can be very useful (especially in fast moving action when it's very hard for any camera to focus where you want it)

3. 1/1000s if anything is moving fast. Don't worry about ISO if you are at 1600 or under. If 3200 and over - find a decent noise removal tool.

4. 8fps and hope for the best.

Always remember - noisy image is much better than out of focus image or motion blurred image. Raise ISO before you slow the shutter.

When I bought the camera I was disappointed with ISO 3200 performance (chroma noise in blotches, etc) when viewed at 1:1. Then I went a spent a lot of time cleaning up some shots taken at 3200 and 6400 (12800 is there just for marketing, hardly usable at all) and they came out quite OK in 15x10cm prints. Once I didn't have time to clean them at all and had to print straight from camera (ISO3200) - and you know what? They came out perfectly usable when prited at 15x10cm. We tend to get easily drawn into pixel peeping and whatnot, but we should just print more.

otto k wrote:

Burst mode produces 5MP images, but the bad thing is they are awful - full of jaggies and moire. Continuous High is better choice (8 fps is quite sufficient, in classical DSLRs you would have to shell out for big guns to get faster than that).

Yes, i sayd burst but did not mean the 15fps mode, but the normal other two

The problem is that write times on NX1000 are very long, especially for RAW+JPEG (~30s for buffer to clear). When I'm shooting with 50-200mm, especially at the long end, here's what I do:

1. Use 10M images - this lens at 200mm is not actually producing 20MP worth of images anyway (same goes for any consumer zoom at far end) - write times are almost halved (JPEG only though)

Althrough i dont find 20Mp useful in most cases, my lens seems to resolve more than 10Mpix, but is only my feeling....

2. AF-S and pre-focus on something and wait for action to come to focus zone - not ideal, but AF-C is a joke on samsung cameras prior to NX1/NX500. This was they way to shoot in MF days as well and with a bit of practice can be very useful (especially in fast moving action when it's very hard for any camera to focus where you want it)

3. 1/1000s if anything is moving fast. Don't worry about ISO if you are at 1600 or under. If 3200 and over - find a decent noise removal tool.

Go for noisware comunity edition, is free and works well with samsung noise.

4. 8fps and hope for the best.

Always remember - noisy image is much better than out of focus image or motion blurred image. Raise ISO before you slow the shutter.

When I bought the camera I was disappointed with ISO 3200 performance (chroma noise in blotches, etc) when viewed at 1:1. Then I went a spent a lot of time cleaning up some shots taken at 3200 and 6400 (12800 is there just for marketing, hardly usable at all) and they came out quite OK in 15x10cm prints. Once I didn't have time to clean them at all and had to print straight from camera (ISO3200) - and you know what? They came out perfectly usable when prited at 15x10cm. We tend to get easily drawn into pixel peeping and whatnot, but we should just print more.

Thanks - Will continue to experiment based on these comments.