Indoor Sports

Here's a shot of Shelby at judo practice last night. Indoor sports photography is always a challenge. The lighting is almost always poor. Plus, the weird and mixed color casts from the different light sources aren't "fun" like they were here. And then there are the challenges of the particular sport, in this case judo. You want to get a nice action shot, but a good deal of the time, you end up being in a bad position relative to the competitors...or right as the throw happens, someone gets between your camera and the action.

This was shot with my EOS 5D and a 70-200mm 2.8L IS lens. I set the ISO to 1600 (hence the "noise" and the reason why this photo really won't look a lot better big if you click on it) and shot aperture priority 1/200s at f/4. The computer tells me I was zoomed to 130mm, I would have probably done better to have gone out to 200mm, since I ended up cropping a butt out of the left side of the frame and some wires and junk off the top. I worked on the white balance some when I did the raw conversion, but it is basically hopeless. The lights are not all the same, and there is a nasty red light coming from the reflection off the mat.