Hello all!

I am shooting my first dog agility practice tommorrow and I am told that there are quite a few black dogs.

The enviroment is a warehouse brightly lit with flourescent lights and the floor is a black mat.

I am shooting with a Nikon D50 with a 70-300 lens.

The instructor prefers I do not use a flash for this class.

Any help is much appreciated!

Hey Ahleha,

You might want to post this in the Business Forum. There has been quite a bit of discussion on agility trials there.

-JM

I would pass on this job. This would be a tough job with my 200mmf2.8 lens which is 2 stops faster than your lens. You will not have enough light to get a fast enough shutter speed to stop the action and the rules for Dog Agility does NOT allow the use of flash for safety concerns of the dog. If you raise the ISO high enough to get the shutter speed you need to stop the action, the mat and the black dogs will show significant digital noise and you won't be happy with the photos. I doubt that Noise Ninja would be able to remove the amount of noise you will encounter. Sorry to have such a negative post, but I have been there, done that.

This is just a practice run to try out the new camera. Not for sales, although I will be meeting folks and getting my name out there.

I am going to give it a try and see how far I can push the camera.

So given my equipment a 70-300 mm f4-f5.6 do you all concur the lowest fstop with the highest iso?

Would investing in a 200 f2.8 lens be ideal for dog agility indoors? I hope to do most of my work outdoors in the summer.
Thanks again.

The 200mmf/2.8 was a typo and I meant to type 80-200mmf/2.8.
Because of the low lighting and the lack of flash, I do not photograph Dog Agility indoors. To stop the action, you need a shutter speed of between 1/250 to 1/1000 depending on the angle of the dog and how fast it is going. I also photograph Basketball indoors and the brightest gymnasium in Alaska I have to shoot iso 800, 1/250, f/2.8. So if your indoor Dog Agility is as bright as this gymnasium, then you will have to shoot at iso 3200, 1/250, f/5.6. Your lens is too slow for this kind of work. You are going to have underexposed and lots of digital noise in your photos because you can not get the exposure correct. The last Dog Agility Trial I did indoors was so dark that I had to go into the roof and hang 4 1000 watt White Lightning Strobes just to be able to shoot at 1/250, iso 400, f/2.8. With the storbes in the ceiling, the judges ruled that it was not a safety concern for the dogs because the flash was overhead, instead of in the eyes. Still, some dogs froze when the strobes went off, so even this is not a viable solution. Until Nikon or Canon comes out with a camera that will go 6400 noise free, the inside Dog Agility trials just won't be covered much.

If you limited yourself to some of the closer obstacles, you could get by with an 85mmf/1.4 lens. that would give your 4 stops more light than what you have and 2 stops more light than what I am using. that lens is around $1000.00

Just to underscore what David is saying, you need a fast lens to shoot Agility indoors for any purpose and under flourescent lighting it's even more of a problem. I've shot several Trials indoors under carbon arc lighting and gotten pretty good images but at least they were correctible for color in PhotoShop. Flourescents are real difficult and mixed lighting is almost impossible.

I shoot indoors with a Sigma 70-200 F2.8 zoom at ISO800 and wide open and only shoot RAW which I can then boost for an additional stop in post-processing (also gives you more control of White Balance).

While I wouldn't say it's impossible to get good Agility shots indoors, it certainly is a technical challenge. Good luck and let us know how you do.

Jim

So how did it go??? Tell us about your experience and what worked and didn't.

Aside from the f stop and high ISO, you're also about to take a crash course in AF tracking! The D50 doesn't have blazing fast AF module, and the 70-300 is no spark either. But, if you have enough light, you should be able to get the hang of it with AF-C mode, keeping an eye on which AF points are locking.

Or, if you have a repetitive performance circuit with the dogs, you'll want to lock focus in manual on an area where you know the dog will be passing through, and depress the shutter when it gets there. No flash...bummer.