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!
