This photo's...

...pretty amazing on a bunch of different levels:


Where to start?

1. Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom with a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length range of 98-280mm; this shot at 98mm
   
2. ISO 6400, with no (that's as in "none") digital noise reduction after RAW conversion
3. I screwed up and (because I kept wiping the camera off with a towel from my trunk during one of Puget Sound's famous "drowning mists") actually shot this at 320th second, f5.6, rather than the 250th of a second I had really intended
4. So during RAW conversion this received an exposure compensation of +2.0
5. Manually set White Balance at 3300K in the camera, and during RAW conversion; noise reduction "high" during RAW conversion; sharpness "3" as-shot during RAW conversion
6. (You can see how the White Balance of 3300K really works pretty well because you can discern the different hues between the stripes on the jersey, which are a very pale cream, and the numbers, which as is the ball, are white)
   
7. Adjusted Levels down to 240 on the high end during post-processing
   

And all this was from a shot made under the (in)famous McMurray field lights, which are adequate for human vision at night, but worse than a joke for photography.

Fortunately the subject was right in front of me, and the light tower was just back off behind my right shoulder.

Now up...

...Raptors v Storm BU-12 soccer shot at night under the lights at McMurray.

I finally decided to add just a touch of digital noise reduction to the post-processed tiff's using Neat Image.

Neat Image uses either canned or self-created profiles of digital noise for specific camera bodies at specific ISO, shutter speed, and f-stop combinations.

I used a profile for my old 5D at ISO 1600, 200th second at f5.6 because it took just a taste of the very little digital noise that came out of my new 5D Mark II at ISO 6400, 200th at f5.6.

Again, the RAW's received exposure compensation of +1.6 during RAW conversion into tiffs, and then I did a little top-end levels adjustment during cropping.

The resulting photos are consistent, if not a little too soft in some cases.

Working on...

...VISC Raptors v Storm BU-12 soccer.

These were shot at night down at McMurray, which does have field lighting, but which does not have any sort of field lighting that a camera can work with, or so you would think.

The lights are only out at the edges of the entire field complex (which has room for one baseball and one softball field, and two soccer fields all at once, and then only on two opposite sides, making for a very hard, directional light that does let people be out there at night, but which provides almost nothing a photographer could really work with.

:-/

First of all, the lights are a really weird color which even the unaided human eye can sense.

I took a wild guess and set my new EOS 5D Mark II's White Balance to "fluorescent", which is 4000K, and which supposedly matches "standard" metal halide lighting.

("Fluorescent" works very well over on the Vashon High School football/soccer/lacrosse field for night sports photography).

Then I needed to deal with the fact that there's simply not much light out there, no matter what it's color. The 5D Mark II was set at ISO 6400 (!), manual exposure (M) of 200th second at f5.6,

Right away during RAW conversion "fluorescent" or 4000K was clearly too yellow, although at that the colors were still off, anyway.

So I did a little tinkering and settled on a manual Color Temperature setting of 3500K as being "good enough" for RAW conversion.

To deal with the lack of light I settled on doing an Exposure Compensation of +1.6 and the resulting photos were at least acceptable to look at and see if there was any soccer action worthy of having been photographed...

So here's a small (600 pixel by 400 pixel at 180ppi jpeg, with no digital noise reduction applied whatsoever:



Remember, folks, this was shot at ISO 6400!

The EOS 5D Mark II is becoming more impressive the more I use it!