Nikon D4: Sports Camera Setting

In an earlier blog post I gave you my normal settings for the Nikon D4 for how I shoot. Here is a link to that post.

These are the settings that I use on my Nikon D4 for shooting most all sport action. Nikon has made it really nice to allow photographers to save these settings so they do not have to remember each and every little setting they like to use for a style of shooting.

If you go to Menu and under the camera icon pick the first item "Shooting menu bank." I have chosen C, which is my sports menu.

If you toggle into the "Shooting menu bank" you can rename those settings. Once you choose one of these settings everything you do to change the menu will be saved in that menu bank. I recommend to go ahead and try all my settings and then tweak them to your preferences.

When shooting sports it is very common for the lighting conditions to change instantly. While the football player runs toward you they may go from shade into direct sunlight. For this reason I let the camera do some of the thinking for me.

Go to the camera icon again and look for "ISO sensitivity settings." Select this and you will then see this menu:

I turn on the "Auto ISO sensitivity control." Then I set the minimum shutter speed to 1/2000. The ISO setting is what you see in the smaller window below the menu. I set this to ISO 100 and then set the "Maximum sensitivity" to ISO 12800.

While I am in Aperture Mode shooting the camera will always pick 1/2000 shutter-speed. If in sunlight I am at ƒ/4 the shutter-speed may go as high at 1/8000 at ISO 100, but as the scene changes and the athlete is now in the shade the camera will automatically drop to 1/2000 @ ƒ/4 and then change also the ISO up until I can still shoot at 1/2000.

The only time the shutter speed will dip below the 1/2000 is if the ISO peaks out at 12800.  If my aperture is wide open then the camera is doing everything that I would have done manually, but faster than I could ever adjust the camera. That is how you get more shots than the guy next to you.

Under the custom settings bank (Pencil Icon) I go into the auto focus setting.

I change the "Focus tracking with lock-on" from Normal to 4. What happens when I do this is the delay for the lens to refocus if something comes in between the camera and subject (like a referee). While I am following someone the camera will not refocus right away. This is something you need to try and pick what you like. You may want the lens to be more responsive and therefore go to setting 1 which will let the lens refocus instantly.

Focus Settings

I set the camera to AF mode. I also run this in continuous focus mode rather than single.

I go into the menu and select under custom settings the AF activation and choose "AF-ON only." This means when I press the shutter it will not focus the lens.  It will only fire the camera. To focus I am using the AF-ON button on the back of the Nikon D4.

By changing these settings you will notice the camera will stay in focus and shoot faster frame rate. Great for following a baseball player sliding into a plate and another player trying to tag them or maybe a football player running towards you to score. You will find more photos tack sharp in a series.

I generally put my focus point dead center and lock it so I don't bump it. I am trying to get photos of moving subjects and off center is too difficult for me. I may crop later for a better composition, but I want the subject in focus first.

Now of the 51 different focus points you can choose groups of these to help with focusing. I went with Nikon's suggested 21-point dynamic-area AF.

Here are suggestions by Nikon in the manual:

The only other setting is on the lens that I turn on VR. 

Nikon D4: Normal Camera Setting

These are my settings for normal shooting. Normal shooting for me is more photojournalistic using a lot of available light and lenses from 14 - 300mm range.

The first thing I do is select my shooting menu bank in the menu. I have saved two primary shooting setups.

I have normal for most average situations and shooting using studio flash. You can rename these to whatever you like to use.  I have occasionally setup a sports menu bank as well. Once you select this setting everything you then set in your menu will be saved here.

My primary slot is the XQD and the secondary slot is overflow. I am normally shooting in RAW in this setting. This means I can change white balance later if I want with more control than I would have in JPEGs.

Also I have set the bit depth to the highest setting of 14-bit to give me the largest possible data capture from the sensor.

I set the picture control to standard which only really affects the previews in a RAW.  If you are saving as JPEG and RAW then the JPEGs will be a little more punch than the Neutral which for me is too flat.

I shoot in the ADOBE RGB color space and after editing in Lightroom I output to sRGB.  In the Adobe RGB I have the largest color space and therefore when editing will have more information giving better color in the final image.

I prefer to shoot in AUTO ISO.  The ISO sensitivity is set at ISO 100 and set to max out at ISO 12,800.  I will go into this setting and often tweak the minimum shutter speed, especially when shooting under fluorescent lights to 1/100.  I wrote about Auto ISO in an earlier blog post here. While it is written about the Nikon D3S the concept hasn't changed.  Earlier I also wrote about the reason to shoot at 1/100 with fluorescent lights here.

In the custom settings I only change a few from the default settings.

I use the auto focus points of 51 with auto setting on single. It will look for faces automatically.  I may override this if the auto setting isn't locking in where I typically want. Often it is faster than me and sometimes I just need to override who I want as the focus point when there are many people in a photo.

I also like to embed my name in all the photos. So both in Image Comment and Copyright Information I put my name.

I will write more in future posts on settings for studio strobes and sports.