There’s a particular school gymnasium in Perth where the lighting is very challenging for action photography. It’s possibly the worst lit gym in the entire city.
At night, the fluorescent lights are dim (and have been for years), cast different shades of sickly green-tinted light in different parts of the hall, and also differ in brightness from one area to another. In some corners, the lights have failed, so the nearest light source is from the next fluorescent light several metres away.
During the day, the overall lighting is obviously much brighter and more consistent (since there’s much less dependence on the artificial lights), but the interior is still much darker than outside. If a door is open, shooting against the incoming sunlight virtually guarantees contrast problems (strong backlighting), and usually white balance problems as well.
In short, out of all the sports venues in Perth I’ve shot in over the years, this school gym is easily the most challenging one to shoot in. The poor lighting here is a standing point of good-natured humour within the RTKD Perth Region Photography Group, since it’s very difficult to get good action photographs in this hall.
I hope the school doesn’t change a single thing about the lighting in its gym.
Why?
As i’ve said to many people, if you can take good action photographs in this school gym, you can take good action photographs anywhere. It’s thus an exceptional place in which to practise low light action photography. Battling against the varying, low light takes every ounce of skill we can muster, and pushes our equipment to the limit. The only types of photography I can think of that take place in poorer lighting conditions require strobes, tripods, or specialised lenses far beyond most individuals’ budgets.
Most of the time, I shoot low light action with prime lenses, but recently I tried shooting in this gym with a Nikkor AF-S 70–200 mm f/2.8 VR II. The maximum aperture is two stops smaller than what I normally use (f/1.4), but since I’ve tended to use ISO 800 to ISO 1600 at f/1.4, I planned to boost sensitivity by a stop or two and see how it all went.
In the end, I was shooting at ISO 6400 using f/2.8, and was getting exposure durations of 1/100 s to 1/200 s—barely fast enough to catch action without heavy motion blurring. I could have used higher sensitivities, but with my current equipment the image quality takes a definite downward turn above ISO 3200. I tried shooting both with VR on and with VR off, and the best results came when shooting relatively slow motion with VR on (such as for less spontaneous action, e.g., the side kick break above). As I practise with this lens, I expect to enjoy more success with it, but the loss of two stops in the aperture had an even bigger practical effect on shooting than I’d anticipated.
On the other hand, changing focal length quickly (zooming in or out) was clearly much faster than physically repositioning and then reframing with a prime lens. This would be invaluable for some types of shooting, but perhaps less so for the low light action shooting I tend to do. The perspective at 200 mm is also significantly different from that at 85 mm, 75 mm, or 50 mm, and it’ll be interesting to explore this in the coming months and years.
Overall, though, even based on a single event’s worth of shooting, it’s clear that for a new martial art photographer or someone on a limited budget, a low to mid-level consumer DSLR body (EF-S bodies from Canon, or DX bodies from Nikon) with a 50 mm f/1.8 prime lens (effectively being a short telephoto lens in this context) would still be the kit with the best value for money. This would be well under the $1,000 mark, yet be able to serve well into the future.