The field had four small, low banks of lights, one in each corner. They were your standard sodium vapor bulbs. Each bank had two rows of lights with about six lights in each row. I positioned myself directly under the light to get the most light on the faces of the players coming at me. The exposure for the lighted area was ISO1600, 1/320 at f2.8. Not bad… until I turned toward the goal. Unfortunately, the lights didn’t put out enough power to reach the middle of the field. The way they were positioned, they didn’t put any light in front of the goal either. What I was left with was acceptable light in the corners and darkness in the middle, more than a whole stop difference.

This called for the use of flash. Unfortunately, I have grown to dislike using flash on outdoor sports. Not only is there red eye to deal with, but there are usually color balance issues and a loss of any sort of naturalness (if that’s a word) to the photo. Also, Canon’s flash system flat-out stinks. It has a mind of its own and no real consistency when in eTTL.

To partially combat the red eye, I mounted my flash upside down to a clamp on my monopod and used a TTL cord to trigger. The theory is that the further away from the lens you can put your flash, the less likely you’ll get red eye. There are formulas to calculate distance ratios based on focal length, distance from subject and distance from light source. Since my subjects are constantly moving, there’s no point in getting technical. I just put the flash as far down the monopod as the cord would reach. Mounting it upside down gave me a few extra inches.

As you can kind of see, the kid on the right still has red eye (which I corrected in PS as best as possible), and I got this nasty upward shadow. Not exactly ideal. Shooting downfield produced better results, since the shadow disappeared into the background instead of the nearby fence, like here:

No nasty shadow, but now I ran into a different problem: flash sync. My Canon MkII camera only syncs at 1/250 of a second. As you can tell, this isn’t always fast enough to freeze the action. Another knock on using flash is its limited recharge rate. With full batteries, it took at least a second for the flash to be ready to fire again. (Without the flash, the camera fires eight frames per second.)

To up the flash sync, I had to switch cameras. My old Canon 1D has a sync speed of 1/500. The downside is that it produces very small files with little room for exposure error, even in raw mode. I was also limited to ISO1000, since files above that are too noisy for my taste.

Ok, better. But to help with the refresh times on the flash, I only went to 1/320 of a second. 1/500 required it to put out too much power for such a fast moving sport.

Now here is where the night got interesting. Since I only brought one flash (dumb mistake, I know), I set my MkII camera to expose manually for the lit area. This is the result:

The result is much more natural looking. I switched back and forth between cameras for awhile as the play moved closer and further from me. I had my 300 on one camera and 70-200 zoom on the other. One one particular play, I got caught with the wrong camera following the action toward the goal. My MkII, which was set to expose for the area in the light, caught this image right in front of the goal:

Uncropped or toned, I thought it was a throw away for sure. You can see how big a difference in lighting there was from the previous picture. Going through my edit, a co-worker saw this frame and asked if I could make it work with a little lot of help from Photoshop. I didn’t think so, but I gave it a try anyway. A little bit of shadow/highlight tool here, some levels there, adjust the curve a bit, re-adjust the color and saturation, crop, and voila!

Holy smokes, that’s acually newspaper usable! I wouldn’t want to see it run huge, but as a two-column photo on newsprint, it might actually look alright. I was amazed with Photoshop’s ability to find the color in that file. I was even more amazed that the MkII stored that much information in the image on my M1 jpeg setting. The camera stores jpegs at compression levels from 1-10. One is the most compression and smallest file size, and 10 is the least compression and largest file size. This photo was shot at 8. Some compression, but generally not noticable for newspaper work. There is no way I could have pulled this much information from my original 1D at 1600, that’s for sure.

This is by no means a breakthrough revelation. The 4-year-old, now discontinued MkII has since been replaced by the MkIIn and MkIII. Each new generation of camera has produced better results at higher ISOs, thus eliminating the need for flash altogether at high school stadiums. Nikon’s D3 has pushed the envelope even further. Until my newspaper decides to upgrade its 7-year-old 1D bodies, I’m stuck relying on Photoshop and the technology of my personal MkII to make usable images at some of these dungeons we photograph. It’s worth repeating that my MkII is not a company-issued piece of gear.

If the Canon gods are reading this, please make all of our 1D shutters blow one week before the state football tournament. With no time to get fixed, we’ll all have to get new cameras. I think that’s the only way the company will fork over the money for replacements. Until then, they’re content fixing a hot shoe here or a shutter there. And while all these fixes certainly add up financially, spread out over the course of the year, no one in accounting notices. I think it’s going to take several fatal failures all at once to get our much-needed upgrade. My fingers are crossed!