Clear skies in Palouse, WA at Washington State

Since the wide and mid-range setup worked just fine, I decided to stick with that, but on the long end I brought a Nikon D200 and Nikon 400mm f/2.8 non-VR lens (Nikon, yucky!).

Long range: Nikon D200 with 400 f/2.8 (35mm equivalent: 600mm f/4.2)
Midrange:  Canon 1D Mark II with 70-200 f/2.8 IS (35mm equivalent: 91-260mm f/3.6)
Wide: Canon 5D with 24-70 f/2.8 (35mm equivalent: 24-70mm f/2.8)
Ultrawide: Canon 5D with 12-24 f/4.5-5.6 (35mm equivalent: 12-24 f/4.5-5.6

Handling the 600mm Beast

Compared to the Canon 40D with 1.4x teleconverter and 70-200 f/2.8 IS I had last time, the D200 equipped with a big prime like the 400 f/2.8 was a very different kind of beast.  To start off, the setup was far more clunky – while a 70-200 and 40D can easily sling over your shoulder or around your neck, and can be handheld without a problem, the 400mm is heavy and on top of that really needs to be used with a monopod.  This is problematic in a few ways:

• Monopods need to be set up.  Sure, you can set it to a certain height, but this also somewhat restricts your vantage point.  You might want to take some shots close to the ground to give the “imposing giant” perspective when looking upward at players.  Or you may want to go up higher so that you can see “over” the offensive and defensive lines and actually get a shot of the quarterback.  Using a monopod (same issue with a tripod) requires one to extend or contract the height in order to get the vantage point you want.
• It’s hard to run with a 10 pound lens.  Football games require a lot of running around, moreso than most other sports.  While baseball or association football (soccer) might sit all the photographers into a designated press box, football allows for some modest free reign back and forth along the sidelines and behind the end zones.  This means you’ll do a fair bit of running back and forth, especially after any big plays that move the ball deep downfield, or any change of possession.  With my more moderate setup the previous week, I could just barely make my way across the field after a change of possession, and it was impossible to switchover in time after a big offensive play.  With a huge 400mm weighing me down, it was pretty much guaranteed that I couldn’t make my way across the field without missing at least half of the next play, and that was with a little extra hustle and sprinting than I’d normally put in.
• The 400mm can’t be dropped.  One of the facts of sports photography is that no one lens will really cover it all (well, if you’re using quality primes/short zooms rather than cheap ultrazooms).  Inevitably, you’ll need to switch from your long lens to your short, especially on a big play that breaks from say a far-away quarterback to a wide receiver who’s racing down your end of the sideline.  Because my long-range was a prime (unlike the 70-200 zoom I had last time), the need to switch lenses on the fly was even more critical.  Unfortunately, the weight of the 400 and its attached monopod means I couldn’t just toss it on the ground or flip it over my shoulder like I could with the 70-200 setup.  I eventually learned to just sit the 400 gently on my lap when I needed to switch, but this solution resulted in a few missed frames and series, so it wasn’t ideal.

Beyond physical lens-handling issue, actually shooting with an effective 600mm angle of view wasn’t a walk in the park either.  Obviously, the angle of view you’ll get is extremely narrow – just 4.1 angular degrees across the diagonal.  Shooting from the sidelines, you’re typically relegated to focusing on just a single player, which can produce some cool shots but most of the time leaves you without any context whatsoever:

Cal quarterback Kevin Riley... uh... holds the ball? Not really sure what's going on in this photo.

Another issue with a 600mm equivalent is having far too narrow an angle of view – there simply isn’t much margin for error at all with regards to framing, which means a lot of cropped-off appendages and helmets.

Washington State's Chantz Staden can't quite get his feet and legs all in the frame.

In addition, the “viewfiner vision” with such a narrow angle of view means you’re primarily locked onto a single player and have no reliable way of anticipating where other players are or where they might interact, and the result is many frames of funky composition focused on a single player.

Christopher Ivory faces unknown out-of-frame obstacles

Cal quarterback Kevin Riley hands the ball off to someone awkwardly out of frame

To be fair, this was my first real experience using the Nikon 400, and I got much better as the game progressed, so this is certainly a learnable skill.  One of the workarounds, for instance, is to shoot from the endzone rather than the sideline.  This applies even when the line of scrimmage is way off on the other side of the field – the 600mm equivalent will reach far enough, but the cross-field distance now gives you more flexible working room.  You don’t get the same close-up effect, but the results are still very good (and you’ll get a lot more keepers):

Cal cornerback Syd'Quan Thompson zeroes in on Wazzu receiver Brandon Gibson

All in all, the D200 and 400mm setup was a pain to use – its weight leaves you more worn out in the latter stages of the game, takes time to set up and takes time more to switch over to another zoom range, all of which result in missed shots and a more rushed pace while shooting.

The extremely narrow angle of view, while delivering fantastic close-ups, also lowers the keeper rate significantly.  There were dozens of shots like those above which would have looked fantastic, save for the small framing errors that render them effectively useless.

Despite all this, there’s no denying that when it gets it right, shots from the D200+400 setup blew away anything I got with the 1dm2+70-200 midrange kit:

1D Mark II, 70-200: Cal defenders team up to bring down Washington State RB Christopher Ivory

Nikon D200, 400: Cal defenders team up to bring down a Washington State player

1D Mark II, 70-200: Cal quarterback Nate Longshore gets ready to hike the ball.

Nikon D200, 400: Washington State quarterback Gary Rogers talks to the sideline.

By the numbers

So numbers-wise, how did the game pan out by equipment?

324 total shots
Nikon D200 with 400 f/2.8: 187 shots (57.7%)
Canon 1D Mark II with 70-200 f/2.8 IS: 96 shots (29.6%)
Canon 5D with 24-70 f/2.8: 26 shots (8.0%)
Canon 5D with 12-24 f/4.5-5.6: 15 shots (4.6%) 

Wowsers – despite all of the troubles I had with the 400 and all the shots I threw away, a majority of the “good” shots came from the long-range setup.  This is in huge contrast to the 40% long-range proportion I got in my first game using the 40D and 1.4x+70-200 f/2.8 as my long-range lens.

The story isn’t dramatically different when taking at the selection of “best” shots that I included into my gallery for the game.

47 total shots
Nikon D200 with 400 f/2.8: 23 shots (48.9%)
Canon 1D Mark II with 70-200 f/2.8 IS: 16 shots (34.0%)
Canon 5D with 24-70 f/2.8: 6 shots (12.8%)
Canon 5D with 12-24 f/4.5-5.6: 2 shots (4.3%)

The long-range setup is still favored by a wide margin, especially compared to the long-range results from the week 1 game (just 22.2% of the gallery shots).

So after two games, my general conclusion is that the focal range/working distance tradeoff doesn’t matter too much – with a midrange 70-200ish zoom, you’ll be up-close at the sideline.  With a huge 600mm equivalent, you’ll simply sit further back and shoot from the corners or back of the endzone, rather than the sideline.

The key here then is simply the depth of field and quality of the out-of-focus regions.  In the first game, the midrange 91-260mm f/3.6 setup simply gave a shallower depth of field and better isolative effect than the long-range 157-448mm f/6.4. (If you want to boil it down to equivalencies, they’d be the same at 260mm f/3.6 vs. 448mm f/6.4, but at any focal length below the maximum 448mm, the midrange would have the advantage.  For example, at 250mm you’d still be getting f/3.6 with the midrange, while you’d be stuck with f/6.4 on the long-range).

In the second game, of course, the 600mm f/4.2 long-range delivered far higher bokeh quality in most long-range situations, since most of the midrange lens’ shots would have to be cropped in further, quickly multiplying the f/3.6 aperture (if you wanted to crop down to a 600mm equivalent, the equivalent aperture would be f/8.3).

Zach Follett returns a fumble for a touchdown. This image was initially taken at 260mm f/3.6 equivalent, but after cropping becomes a 407mm, f/5.6 equivalent

Of course in close-range situations where the 90-260mm could provide a close-up without any further cropping, the f/3.6 aperture would actually edge the f/4.2 slightly, which is why the midrange is still capable of delivering plenty of shots that look equally as good from a technical standpoint:

Washington State halfback Christopher Ivory looks for a hole

California quarterback Kevin Riley jogs back to the sideline

The Midrange vs. Longrange Tradeoff

The problem with using the midrange lens and achieving high-quality isolating shots, of course, is getting close enough to the subject in the first place.  With the huge expanse of a football field, chances are that the major action or the player you’re trying to focus on won’t be close enough for a 260mm equivalent lens, so you’ll have to crop down.

Of course, there will be situations where the subject is too close for a long-range 600mm equivalent, which is no good either.  However, you can always back up or move further downfield to give you more working room.  With a midrange lens that doesn’t reach far enough, there’s no way to get any closer to the subject than your spot on the sideline. (This is the exact opposite problem faced by most photojournalists, landscape photogs, or travelers – oftentimes in these cases you’ll be able to get as close as you want, but you’ll often find situations with very cramped working room, so a wide-angle there is actually the most versatile.)

Of course, the reduced quality from wider shots can also be a blessing in disguise.  While close-ups are the only way to maximize the shallow depth of field isolative quality, it also severely limits your margin for framing error, as well as awareness of outside-of-frame events, as seen in the 400 shots above.  Having a wider lens gives you room to crop the perfect framing afterwards, and also catch action that suddenly moves up close to you.

So the tradeoff again boils down to that age-old equipment debate: quality or versatility?  In most cases a large aperture long-range lens like the 400mm f/2.8 will deliver higher quality, except for rare cases where the subjects come close enough that a similarly large aperture 70-200 f/2.8 can match it.  On the other hand, the more versatile midrange lens will always afford you greater versatility and margin for error (with cropping, its framing possibilities are a superset of a longer-range lens).

As a photojournalist, and entering my first game and a half with that mindset, my initial preference would be for the midrange lens.  True, quality won’t be as consistently good, but the journalist’s mindset is to simply cover every facet of the game, which means getting a usable shot from every play.  For the photojournalist, it’s more important to get the shot of the crucial game-changing interception, than it is to come back with five generic portrait-like images that could appear on a Sports Illustrated cover.  With this kind of approach, you’ll come back with a huge volume of photos, and chances are if the sports writer wants an accompany photo of specific play or player, you’ve got it.  Job accomplished.

Towards the end of this second game, however, and partially with the assurance that I had already bagged plenty of usable images during the first half, I began to experiment much more with the long-range and getting better, more selective shots.  Yes, it meant missing probably dozens of shots due to bad framing, or players racing too close to my end of the field, but the few shots you do end up with using the long-range lens are most likely the ones that will end up on a magazine cover or in your portfolio.

While I’m still fairly a novice at this, I think the second approach is ultimately the solution to becoming a good sports photographer.  Most of the struggles, especially with regard to framing errors, are just that – errors that can be improved upon with training and experience.  As you get better, the keeper rate goes up, eventually (hopefully) to a point where you’ll be able to sufficiently cover all the major events or action despite using a more restrictive long telephoto.

The other equipment-related solution is a massively large aperture zoom lens.  Hopefully one of these days I’ll get a chance to play with a Sigma 120-300 f/2.8 or Sigma 200-500 f/2.8 for sports photography – either of these would be an absolute dream lens for sports photography.

This is part 4 of 4 in Football Photography X’s and O’s, a 4-part series of insights on shooting football.

Part 1: Equipment Analysis 1 (Michigan State game)
Part 2: Aperture-priority Exposure Technique
Part 3: Lighting Situations
Part 4: Equipment Analysis 2 (Washington State game)

Daylight

Anyhow, full daylight creates problems with extremely harsh shadows, particularly on player’s faces under helmets and such.  The problem is exacerbated if you’re shooting at an angle where the player is backlit or even severely sidelit.  For example, this might be a perfectly usable photo, but it doesn’t quite have the instant eye-catchiness of better sports photos – the entire image is really busy because the brightest-lit areas are the least detailed (field, crowd in background), and the important areas (player’s faces, bodies) are masked in shadow.

Washington State's Christopher Ivory about to collide with California linebacker Anthony Felder

Contrast this to this fully-lit photo (actually sidelighting from the right, but the player is facing that direction anyway).  Now the brightest (and instantly eye-catching) area of the image is the player’s body and face, which also happens to be the most detailed area and the focus of the image:

California running back Jahvid Best evades Michigan State tacklers

The key for daylight then (without clouds) is to get into a position where the sun is coming from behind or to the side of you (but still relatively behind, if possible).  Since most games are noon or later, the sun will tend to be on the west side where it sets, so the preference would be to shoot from the west end of the stadium (of course, you may not have this luxury, as sometimes they restrict you to the visiting team’s sideline).  Another strategy is to simply shoot from the endzone - most all football stadiums are oriented facing north-south to avoid playing directly into the sun during sunlight games, so at the very worst you’ll have a side-lit image, which often isn’t bad at all, as the above photo shows.

A closer look at more difficult shaded and nighttime lighting conditions after the jump.

Shade and Cloud Cover

As the sun begins to set, or if clouds start rolling in, the dynamic of the light changes completely.  Rather than having harsh shadows from a single point light source (the sun), under shadow conditions the entire sky becomes your (much less intense) light source, with the atmosphere reflecting light and illuminating the field.  Or with cloud cover, the entire cloud (significantly bigger than the sun in angular area terms) becomes the light source.  In either case, the lighting becomes much more diffuse, which essentially eliminates shadow problems and having to take lighting direction into consideration.

Michigan State running back Javon Ringer looks for a hole to make the quick break

I like this photo a lot, possibly moreso from a non-sports standpoint – because of the diffuse lighting you can see all the detail in the image extremely well – there’s barely anything blown out at all.  It’s exactly the attributes you’d want from a sports photo if you were a landscape or interior building photographer.

One thing you’ll notice, though, is that despite the details and how easy the image is on the eyes, it definitely lacks some of the hard contrast or “bite” that one finds in bright daylight photos, like the Jahvid Best photo above.  While it was definitely easy to process, once the entire stadium is shrouded in shade like it is here, it’s a bit harder to create the contrast that separates the main subject from say the background, since everything in the stadium is evenly lit.

Dealing with semi-lit half-shade

Another issue that crops up with shade as the sun sets is the in-between period when the sun has only partially set, thus leaving part of the stadium shaded and the other side still exposed.  One can imagine this wreaks havoc with exposure, and lighting in general… well, it does:

Bears defensive back Michael Mohamed is backlit by the shade

Autoexposure here obviously locked onto the background and tried to bias it in favor of that.  This situation is pretty bad, because the background is going to be far brighter no matter what you do, which is going to distract attention away from your primary subjects.  Of course, depending on where you’re shooting this can also work in your favor, as a shaded seating area can provide a dark backdrop that focuses attention on the players:

Defensive lineman Tyson Alualu emerges from the shadows

This isn’t really a fantastic photo, but it looks a heck of a lot better than if the background was completely exposed and distracting.  Other issues including subjects being half-lit:

Zach Follet attempts to tackle Michigan St. quarterback Brian Hoyer through the shade

Some might say this photo looks cool or interesting, and the half-lighting effect is pretty… different.  In general I’m not a huge fan because it makes the photos far less useful – you can forget about using any of these photos as a cutout because of the huge exposure difference, and it’s impossible to get the exposure just right so that you can see all of the detail – here the image is exposed for the upper bodies, and as a result you don’t see much detail or definition in their legs.  Of course exposing for their lower bodies would completely blow out the top half.  It’s a photo you might try publishing once purely because of the interesting lighting effect, but otherwise as a sports photo it can’t really be used for much.

For these half-shade situations, the key here, in initial or exposure or even post-processing, is to screw the background.  Your focus here is on the players, so you need them to be properly exposed, clipping or blown highlights in the background be damned.  Just compare these images:

    

Jahvid Best runs to the endzone in the shade

Yes, the background is completely blown out, and now it’s really bright and attracting even more attention before.  This is true, but there are several reasons why the second image is better.  Firstly, the subject now has actual, visible detail in the image, instead of being some shadowy figure that partially blended in with the ground.  Secondly, those of you who know what it actually means to clip will realize that, since the second photo really has begun to clip to white, proportionally the background is now less brighter than the subject.  And lastly, despite making the background brighter, blowing the highlights here serves to *decrease* detail in the background, rendering it less appealing than the well-exposed and very detailed image in the first image.

Now that we’ve ascertained that exposing for the player is of the utmost importance, how do we go about doing that on the field?  The answer here is partial or spot metering.  Unlike evaluative/matrix metering, partial or spot looks exclusively at the center of the image (or where ever your AF/metering point is set to) – thus it’s not affected at all by super-dark or super-bright backgrounds, and if you’re tracking the player correctly, the player will always be correctly exposed, which returns the same correct result in fully-lit situations, and the correct result you wouldn’t get otherwise in situations with a much darker or brighter background.  The potential pitfall here is the possibility of the spot meter being thrown off completely by jersey brightness, since this is where you’ll most likely point at, and pretty much all the meter will see using spot.  I would use something slightly larger than a spot meter – maybe the partial meter or at worst, the center-weighted average metering, which tends to be more consistent and balanced out if the players are wearing heavily contrasting jerseys (dark blue vs. white).

Nighttime and Stadium Lights

Once the sunlight levels really start to fall, stadium lights become your primary source of lighting.  Depending on the stadium, this might force you to start taking drastic measures to maintain decent motion-freezing exposures – start ramping up the ISO or even shooting in RAW and underexposing if need be.  Fortunately the lights at Memorial Stadium (and probably most stadiums at the college and professional level) are plenty sufficient – on a Canon 1D Mark II with 70-200 f/2.8 IS lens I was getting perfect exposures at f/2.8, 1/500s, and another Canon 40D with 70-200 f/2.8 IS + 1.4x extender setup, I simply boosted the settings to f/4.0, ISO3200 to achieve the same 1/500s shutter speeds.  With less powerful lights at high school stadiums or community fields, you’ll likely need to boost up to a higher ISO (if you don’t have a higher ISO option, you can use RAW, underexpose by one stop, and boost the exposure in post-processing afterwards, which gives you nearly the same effect), or live with a little motion blur at 1/320s or 1/250s (anything below that and most of your shots will likely turn up unusable).

With most modern DSLRs, even maxed-out noise at 3200 really isn’t bad at all, especially considering that the noise will barely show up on most of the mediums for your images (web-resolution, small prints, or newspaper-quality paper).  For example, here’s an ISO3200 image taken on a Canon 40D:

f/4.0, 1/500s, ISO3200

There’s barely any noise here – certainly nothing that makes the image unusable, and not really even enough that a non-photographer would notice.  Even if you’re really a stickler for noise, you can always run your images through a noise reduction program like Neat Image to filter out what little noise there is:

f/4.0, 1/500s, ISO3200 filtered through Neat Image

Voila, an image that has about as much noise as you’d get shooting ISO400 in daylight, which is to say no noticeable noise at all.  Though we’ve solved the noise problem most often associated with low-light photography, you’ll notice that the photo above still doesn’t have the same aesthetic appeal as any of the photos above taken in daylight or shaded lighting.  I only have a handful of photos from a quarter of a football game to base my observations on, but the lighting quality on all of them look fairly similar to this example, which is to say the lighting is uniformly bad no matter what you do.

The first problem with stadium lighting (as with any artificial lighting) is that the color temperature of the light isn’t usually even across the visual spectrum, like daylight is (daylight will emit relatively equal amounts of red thru blue light, or an overall neutral white).  Classically, tungsten lights have tended to produce more light in the red spectrum and less in the blue, while new fluorescent lights may have even weirder green-magenta shifts. Especially with some fluorescent lights that don’t even emit a continuous spectrum but simply certain specific wavelengths of light, this creates a problem where certain colored subjects aren’t as detailed or richly saturated, simply because the light source isn’t emitting the kind of wavelengths of light that they reflect.

For example, in the night photos above, notice how we have a rich and very detailed yellow, while the blue parts of the jerseys are much darker/muddier, and lack any strong blue saturation – they pretty much just look black, with a hint of blue.  This is what we might expect from a light source that reflects relatively less blue wavelength light.  Contrast that to the much richer blue tones we were getting in the daylight photos, where our light source had an even continuous spectrum of wavelengths:

Kevin Riley looks rich and saturated while immersed in lighting that evenly spans the visible spectrum

Unfortunately, there’s no real way to get around this problem – it’s just the nature of the lighting you have.

Another potential issue that crops up due to the uneven light spectrum problem is white balance – since the light emitted isn’t actually white, and if taken for face value (1 red photon + 1 blue photon + 1 green photon = white) would actually produce a very off-color image (usually orangish or yellowish with artificial lighting), the camera has to compensate and restore a correct “white balance” point.  In my case, the opposing team wore white jerseys that provided a perfect white balance reference, so most of the images turned out fine.  Even so, I’d get an off-color image every once in a while, and the problem would probably have been exacerbated if the other team was wearing a colored jersey as well:

Jahvid Best runs dodges Michigan St. linebackers but can't escape the incorrect white balance.

In most cases, some color balancing in post-processing should be able to easily fix any color cast issues (the example above would take only a very small adjustment), but to fix things in camera, simply define a custom white balance in the camera.  If you happen to have a grey card with you, put it under the stadium lights and you’re gold – otherwise a white jersey or pretty much anything neutral should work fine as well.

In conclusion…

Each of the three main lighting situations (four if you count the hybrid directly lit/shade situation) has its own characteristics, and accordingly advantages and disadvantages.

In terms of quality images, full daylight is probably the best to shoot in – if you can get the subject to be directly lit, you have a very well-lit images with strong, contrasty shadows on areas you don’t care about.  The difficulty with daylight is that you have to keep the direction of the sun in mind – if you wind up in a situation shooting the subject while its’s sidelit or backlit, you end up with harsh shadows obscuring the detailed/important elements of the image, which can all but ruin a great picture.

On the other side, a shaded lighting situation (whether it be from a setting sun or cloud cover) constitutes probably the easiest lighting situation – with diffuse light coming in from virtually every direction, shadows are all but eliminated, allowing you to shoot from anwyhere and not worry about backlighting.  While you’ll certainly get more keepers, you may never get a single shot as good as the best direct daylight shot, because the lack of shadows strips the image of the natural contrast you get from harsh shadows.

A half-lit, half-shadow situation produces interesting results – it can help the photo if you’ve got a shadow in the background, but at the same time it can also hurt the photo if you’ve got a lit area in the background.  The key here is to use a center-weighted metering mode, such as center-weighted average, partial, or spot, to ensure that the main subject is always properly exposed – having the background too dark or too bright is really a secondary concern in this case.

Toughest of all is nighttime situations, simply because the quality of light is so crummy.  Omni-directional lighting means filled-in shadows and less shadow contrast, while non-neutral light sources mean certain colors will simply not render as richly as they’re supposed to.  The one good thing about stadium lighting, however, is that you can now switch to manual exposure, since the output of the stadium lights isn’t changing, and in a decent stadium, the entire playing area should be evenly lit (possibly not the case with lower-budget fields used for high school football or other events). Using manual exposure helps by removing autoexposure issues from the equation completely – the camera should now nail the exposure every time, without regard to jersey brightness or the illumination of the crowd in the background.

This is part 3 of 4 in Football Photography X’s and O’s, a 4-part series of insights on shooting football.

Part 1: Equipment Analysis 1 (Michigan State game)
Part 2: Aperture-priority Exposure Technique
Part 3: Lighting Situations
Part 4: Equipment Analysis 2 (Washington State game)

Use the largest aperture. This goes almost without saying – you want to isolate your subjects in sports photography, and the best way to do that (given a certain camera/lens setup) is to use a wide-open aperture. This also has the advantage of letting in as much light as possible. The margin of error for focus *will* be thinner, but this really shouldn’t be an excuse or barrier to return inferior shots taken at smaller apertures just because it’s easier. Take the out-of-focus shots as they come – every ruined shot should just be an incentive to learn how to effectively track subjects and utilize your camera’s AI Servo/continuous focusing abilities.

Maintain a fast shutter speed in the shaded region. The goal here is to have a fast enough shutter speed to avoid blur, and with your aperture stuck at wide-open, you’ll do that by manipulating your ISO sensitivity. Since you’re shooting in a situation with dynamic lighting, you want to choose the ISO that will give you the necessary speed in the darkest area (i.e. in the shaded portion of the field, or when a cloud rolls by and blocks the sun). If you’re maintaining a decent enough speed in the dark areas (say 1/500s), then you’re guaranteed to get a decent speed in any other area, since it’ll be brighter (if you’re getting 1/500s in the shade, you might get 1/2000s in the sun). Does this mean you’ll be using a higher-than-necessary ISO when you’re in the brigher areas? Yes (if you’re getting 1/2000s in the sun, that means you could drop the ISO 2 stops and still get your 1/500s minimum). However, the noise is going to be a minor problem at the lower ISOs where you might deal with this half-lit, half-shaded situation (the difference between ISO100 and ISO400 is virtually indistinguishable), and in any case you’re only over-using high-ISO in the brighter area, where your noise is going to be less (due to greater amount of light) than whatever you’ve already accepted putting up with in the darker area.

The real important point here is that at all costs, you want to avoid slow shutter speeds, since blurred out pictures are completely unusable and unsalvageable, while most agencies (and any skilled photoprocessor) can put up with a relatively huge amount of noise. So take the noise hit in the brighter situations (which is not going to be that much) if it will help you get rid of blur in the darker regions (which is going to be a huge problem)

Keep track of your shutter speeds as lighting dims. Over the course of a late-afternoon to evening game, the sun is going to set and you’ll gradually see light levels drop, and concurrently, the need for longer shutter speeds and higher-ISOs to compensate. If you’ve got some sort of auto-ISO feature on your camera that helps to maintain a specified shutter speed by adjusting the ISO, use it. Otherwise you’ll have to monitor your shutter speeds as the game goes along and bump up your ISO periodically as you see the shutter speeds dip below the motion blur threshold you want.

Consider center-weighted metering with dynamic secondary elements. In most situations, the default evaluative/matrix/segmeneted metering mode on the camera will do a fantastic job of determing correct exposure.  Where these metering modes often get confused is with highly dynamic secondary elements in the image – very dark shadowed stands in the background, or very bright field in the foreground of a shadowed area.  This throws off the metering and makes the camera think the scene is darker or brighter than it really is in situations like rolling clouds or sunset, where the field (or parts of it) may rapidly become lit or unlit.  The solution for this is to use a center-weighted metering mode that will bias the exposure towards your selected subject.  This way things like a dark background or very bright foreground won’t have any effect on exposure – the camera only looks at your primary subject and determines the correct exposure for that, which is all we care about.  Of course, the potential danger in this is that an athlete’s dark or white jersey will similarly throw the camera’s metering off – the best compromise is probably to use a broader center-weighted focusing mode, such as partial metering or center-weighted average, to include more of the surrounding area and balance out extreme variations.

This is part 2 of 4 in Football Photography X’s and O’s, a 4-part series of insights on shooting football.

Part 1: Equipment Analysis 1 (Michigan State game)
Part 2: Aperture-priority Exposure Technique
Part 3: Lighting Situations
Part 4: Equipment Analysis 2 (Washington State game)