I have had a blast watching my kids in all they do and taking photographs. From Basketball, softball, baseball, soccer, volleyball, rugby to theater. Every activity has its own unique challenges. Light is king! The problem usually is not enough light to get the proper exposure. Shooting in a dark theater, no flash, and usually spotty lighting depending on where the actors and actresses stand. Additionally if you slow the shutter speed down to let more light in to the sensor, eventually you run into motion and blur. If you bump up the ISO eventually everything gets grainy and not flattering.

What can you do? Where do you start. I have come up with a way, a foundation to start and build upon. Starting with the shutter speed set to 1/250th a second. As long as your lens length is not greater than 250mm, set your shutter speed at 250. This stops motion. In fact, you don't even need a tripod. It stops your hand shaking the camera as well.

Next, lens wide open. The aperture or f stop. For Canon the smaller the f value the wider open the lens is. I believe it is the opposite for Nikon. Think of the lens opening like the skinny middle section of an hour glass. That pinch point, or bottle neck, limits how much sand (or light) can pass and accumulate in the bottom. If the bottleneck is bigger, then more sand passes through. The same is with light. So a big aperture lens is called fast glass. And as you would guess, it gets expensive quickly, but it's well worth it in dark conditions. I usually use a 2.8 f-stop. I also have some lenses that are bigger and have a wider opening. The best value is the 50mm prime lens and can be amazingly affordable for 2.8 or smaller (smaller being bigger with Canon)

Now there is one trade off for the wide open lens. The field of focus is narrow. So you want to nail the subject with selective focus and everything else will not be as sharp or out of focus completely. However, that's the best price I have found to pay in extremely low light conditions.

Lastly, I set the ISO to 100 and take a picture. ISO is the digital camera sensor sensitivity setting. At 100 ISO there is no visible grain. I look at the photo just taken. I know its going to need to increase in low light and will continue increasing until the photograph is just slightly under exposed. The purpose for doing that is that images that are underexposed, have details that can be brightened in post photo editing software. However, when something is overexposed, literally some details are blown out and recorded as white. You can never recover details once they are blown out white. You can lighten darkness and shadows, because the information was digitally recorded.

Does this all make sense? If not, please ask and I am happy to answer any questions to help improve your photography! Please join our photography club on meetup and facebook, where we learn to become excellent with photography through classes and outings. Join us on Meetup: https://Meetup Raw-Adventure-Photo-Club or join us on facebook: Facebook Raw-Adventure-Photo-Club