Sports photography

[FingerPainter]

Hi! I just joined this forum. First question. I have a D750 and 70-200 2.8 and shoot under the lights. It worked pretty well but I had to use high ISO and they were grainy without noise ware and then became soft after using that.

Noisy images are the natural consequence of not capturing much light. The less light you capture, the lower the SNR of the image will be and images with lower SNRs look noisier.

Changing camera bodies will not help you with that. The only Z cameras that have a better SNR at high ISO than the D750 are the Z6 and Z6II, but their AF is almost certainly not as good as the D750's for sports, and their SNR advantage is small. The Z8 and Z9 are actually slightly worse in terms of SNR than the D750 at higher ISOs.

I’m looking to upgrade to a Nikon mirrorless. I went to a local camera store and looked at the Z7ii and the z9. The z9 was massive and not sure I want to go that route. It felt heavier than my D750! Anyone use a Z7ii for this purpose and love it? Should I be looking at the z8?

As long as you aren't relying on the upgrade alone to solve your noise problem, the Z8 is probably the way for you to go for sports photography. It is an upgrade from the D750 in many ways, but improved high ISO SNR is not one of those ways. It's high ISO performance is worse, but not significantly worse, than that of the D750.

If you want better SNR in your sports photos under the lights, you will need to shave your settings so you capture more light. If you are stopping down a bit, you will have to accept shooting closer to wide open. You will have to push your shutter speeds slower, to the edge of risking motion blur, but never so far as to get unwanted motion blur. Motion blur, except where you want to explicitly show motion, is usually worse that noise.

If you are cropping, stop doing that. Learn to frame your subjects tightly so you don't have to crop. Cropping throws away light, which makes your cropped images noisier than uncropped ones with the same settings. If you find yourself cropping often, the AF-S NIKKOR 300mm f/2.8G ED VR II lens might be a better purchase than a new body.

If you are already using the widest aperture and slowest shutter you can tolerate, and are not cropping, then you are getting the best SNR you can under the circumstance. Changing bodies won't help you get a significantly better SNR, unless you go to medium format, which doesn't have the AF or the lenses to support your subject.

The other approach to producing better final images involves using better NR software than you can get in ACR or Lightroom. The higher pixel resolution of the Z8 relative to the D750 can help you a bit with that since it gives the NR software more data to work from, usually leaving more detail in the processed image. So even if the Z8 produces a slightly noisier SOOC image, you can probably get a slightly better image after processing with a good AI NR program. I'm sorry that I'm not able to recommend one program over another.

 

[Jeff_0000]

I was planning on getting a new 70-200 z lens with the camera to avoid that and fully benefit from the auto focus system

The new 70180 is also a very good lens for sports photography, if you want to carry a lighter setup.

 

[Dbltfarmer]

Thanks for all the details. I will be shooting football under the lights. I had decent results with the D750 and 70-200 but want better auto focus and was hoping for something a little lighter. The z9 was huge and heavy so I was considering the Z7ii but the z8 seems somewhere in between but I haven’t had a chance to hold it yet. I was planning on getting a new 70-200 2.8 z lens for it. Trying not to spend a fortune but might have to! As I write this response it doesn’t let me see what else you mentioned to refer back to. I usually take photos in RAW and use ACR to adjust exposure and color if needed then photoshop for noise ware and sharpening, straightening, cropping. I don’t hope to get thousands of photos because that’s so much to process and share! Usually I was shooting 7-800 and sharing 2-300 I think

Both the Z mount 70-200 f2.8S and the Z mount 24-70 f2.8 S are both better than adapted G lenses. Af is faster and IQ is much better. I bought the 70-200 F2.8 S while I had my Z6 II. The first night I shot with it at a Tech basketball game i was getting better shots than i could get with the adapted G lens.

For wildlife shooting which is a lot like shooting sports, the Z8 has everything you need that the Z9 has with the possible exception of the battery. I will be finding out soon as i will be trying it for Texas Tech's Fall Camp. Mdia gets about a 30 minute viewing period of practice and I will take 400 to 500 photos per practice.

I use LR for my workflow and post processing. I used to be a Photomechanic user but the software wasnt compatible with my the websites software, namely the auto captioning of names and numbers of players.