How well will the Nikon D5100 w/ 15-88 mm lens shoot sports at night?
I cover high school football for a small town newspaper and need to purchase a camera that can capture movement at night with minimal blurriness. I've heard good things about the Nikon D5100 w/ a 15-88 mm, but I've been unable to find any information on how well it shoots motion under artificial lighting.
I'm very much an amateur when it comes to photography and need all the help I can get.
If you are talking about things like high school football… Not well. Too slow and not long enough.
The downside to this is that lenses which are better for this sort of work are very expensive. You need something like a 70-200 f/2.8 to pull this off, even with the good high ISO capability of that camera. That football field may look bright to your eyes, but to a camera it is very dark. A Tamron lens in that range is something like $750, the Nikon version is $2, 000.
An 18-55 lens would be decent (but not ideal) for general reportage, but not for sports.
Forget shooting any action out on the field as you may have guessed, you don't have the equipment for it. All you can do as I did in school was wait for the action to come to you. That is stay ahead of the team with the ball and hope the "receiver" runs your way with the ball.
Of course "in my day" we used Speed Graphic cameras that took 4x5" size film with a normal lens.
You'd have to up your ISO, while the sensor's a good size, the lens isn't particularly fast. That's why the pros use zoom lenses opening to f2.8 - it's not just the extra reach, but the speed, the 18-55mm is only f5.6 at the long end, meaning you have to balance your ISO with acceptable noise level.
Throw in the selective enlargement you'd have to make to get the images you want, and you'll see why those big, expensive lenses are so useful.
Don't knock the Speed Graphic, Nick, she was a lot handier than an Arca.
The camera is fine, the lens not so much.
The bad news is that sports at night requires the most expensive glass, a single lens will run roughly double or triple the price of the camera. If you go for something with more reach but without a large aperture, you'll end up cranking your ISO to 6400 all night and that will be tough to clean up.
Shoot RAW and clean up with lightroom 4 for the best results. I've shot football at night and even with a my 80-200mm f/2.8 I fight against high ISO, and I can only get cleaner shots with my faster f/1.4 and f/1.8 primes. Bottom line, shooting sports at night sucks if you don't own a Nikon D3s, D4, Canon 1D X or Sony A99.