Robert’s Photography Blog

I had the pleasure of covering Blacks Midnight 7s for Guinness last weekend. The inaugural ‘Blacks Midnight 7s’ celebrated the 50th anniversary of Blacks Rugby Football Club’s (BRFC’s) men’s wing and the 10th anniversary of the women’s wing. There were 58 games by 22 teams spread over 2 days (17 hours). On Saturday, games were held at the CCAB Stadium in Singapore from 2pm until 1am the next day. There were 20 games held under stadium lights. On Sunday, the event ended at 8:30pm which meant that 4 games including the finals were held under the lights. I estimated that under the artificial lights, incident light was 10-12 EV. Yikes! With low ISO and long exposure times, the players would show up as a big blur.

Here is how I dealt with the problem…

My choice of equipment

• Canon EOS 30D
• Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS
• Canon EF 300mm f/2.8 IS
• Gitzo MonoTrek Carbon Fiber Monopod
• Bogen (Manfrotto) Ballhead

Camera Settings (night photography)

• Tv mode: f/2.8-/f.3.2
• ISO: 1600-3200
• RAW + JPEG (small/fine)
• Auto Whitebalance
• AI Servo Focusing (all focus points)

Post-Processing (high-ISO)

• Bibble Pro 4.8 (with Noise Ninja)
• Adobe Photoshop CS2

My strategy was to adjust the ISO and f/stop to keep a minimum shutter speed of 1/320 sec. However, achieving that minimum speed was not always possible. Even at ISO 3200 and f/2.8, the shutter speed would often dip down to 1/200. I kept shooting and hoped for the best!

I could often get away with using the small/fine JPEG for day time photos. The end use was mostly editorial so high-resolution tiffs were not required. I processed the high ISO images from the Raw files with Bibble Pro for two reasons. First, to allow the use of the built-in Noise Ninja (setting=10 for ISO 3200). Second, to allow the generation of full-sized 8MP tiffs. The large images allowed me to take advantage of the noise reduction that takes place in Adobe Photoshop CS2 during bicubic downsampling.

The photo shown above (clickable) was taken during the men’s finals (Brewerkz Bucks vs Singapore Cricket Club) using the Canon EOS 30D and Canon EF 300mm f/2.8 IS lens at 1/200 and f/2.8. The ISO was set at 3200. The resulting photo sized for web use or PowerPoint looks ‘relatively’ noise free even without applying Noise Ninja.

The photo on the left (clickable) is a comparison of full size crops from tiffs generated with Bibble Pro. Here the noise (luminance and chroma) is clearly visible in the ‘untreated’ photo. The bicubic algorithm in Adobe Photoshop CS2 averages out a significant amount of noise during downsampling. If you want to work with larger ISO 3200 images or make prints, then applying noise reduction via Noise Ninja or equivalent is a ‘must’.

See more photos from Blacks Midnight 7s here.

Links to Amazon.com:
Canon EOS 30D
Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS
Canon EF 300mm f/2.8 IS
Gitzo MK2 Carbon Fiber Monopod
Bogen (Manfrotto) Ballhead
Bibble Pro Software