Sports Photography by George Ross

Providence, RI,  has a wonderful new track and field facility at 90 Fricker Street, adjacent to Central High School, wonderful for everyone that is except the poor old sports photographer. Why? No other reason than the quality of the lighting. The new facility is ‘environmentally friendly’ and the lighting remains low when empty  and when more people  fill the gym  the lighting increases but not to the point where it is bright enough for great sports photography.  Ice hockey rinks put there lights on ‘full beam’ for tournaments but not so at 90 Fricker Street. There is no manual over-ride to increase the brightness of the lights for competitions so we sports photographers need to use high ISO levels, degrading the quality of our images,  to obtain a fast enough shutter speed for sport. So, resigned to this fact I upgraded my camera body from an EOS 40D to an EOS 7D to shoot the RI Classic Track and Field Invitational meet on December 30th, 2009 (Well, I will use that as the excuse for buying a new body).Most of my shots were taken at ISO 3200  but as the day progressed that was too slow as my shutter speed dropped to 1/125th, so I pushed the ISO rating to 5000 and ‘wow’ was I surprised at the image quality on the Canon EOS 7D, used in combination with a 70mm-200mm L series f/2.8 IS lens, absolutely fantastic.

In the future, I need not fear the poor gym lighting and will comfortably operate at high ISO levels while using the 7D.

I have attached 3 photos from the meet  – without any post-processing,  straight out the camera -  and for those with a pixel fixation I have included a couple of 100% crops to depict the noise levels and provide a comparison between the EOS 7D and EOS 40D body. You will note all the greater level of noise in the 40D example which is why the Fricker Street gym worried me so much; and now, thanks to the EOS 7D, it is much, much, less of a problem. Phew!

The following 100% crop is smaller due to the EOS 40D producing 10MP images compared to the 18MP which is produced by the EOS 7D

Now this is impressive, this a 100% crop from an  Canon EOS 7D  @ ISO 5000. When this is compared to the above crop from the 40D you can see why I am so excited.