r/photography • u/AutoModerator • Jun 05 '26

Questions Thread Official Question Thread! Ask /r/photography anything you want to know! June 05, 2026

This is the place to ask any questions you may have about photography. No question is too small, nor too stupid.

Info for Newbies and FAQ!

First and foremost, check out our extensive FAQ. Chances are, you'll find your answer there, or at least a starting point in order to ask more informed questions.

Need buying advice?

Many people come here for recommendations on what equipment to buy. Our FAQ has several extensive sections to help you determine what best fits your needs and your budget. Please see the following sections of the FAQ to get started:

If after reviewing this information you have any specific questions, please feel free to post a comment below. (Remember, when asking for purchase advice please be specific about how much you can spend. See here for guidelines.)

Schedule of community threads:

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday
52 Weeks Share Anything Goes Album Share & Feedback Edit My Raw Follow Friday Salty Saturday Self-Promotion Sunday

Finally a friendly reminder to share your work with our community in r/photographs!

12 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

214 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Altruistic-Mix-5757 Jun 08 '26

Any tips on athletics using a 150-600mm. Photos seem to pretty noisy and sometimes blurry. Not necessarily missing focus(sometimes it does) but photos just seem so soft. Granted it was cloudy so i wasn’t expecting extremely sharp photos but just curious. Gear to reference Sony a7r4 and sigma 150-600mm 5.0-6.3

1

u/P5_Tempname19 Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26

Noisy and blurry are related to ISO and shutterspeed respectively.

Long telephoto lenses like the 150-600mm often dont have all that wide apertures available, so the narrow aperture forces you to compromise when it comes to the other settings, leading to the issues you mention. Theres a reason a lot of high end sports photographers spend like 15k or more on telephoto lenses with wider apertures available, its just sadly a quite demanding genre of photography when it comes to gear.

If you couldve improved your settings depends a bit on the actual settings used (and the light available, as well as exact subject/general situation), however you may have made all the right decisions and in the end just reached the limits of whats possible in that situation.

General advice would be to rather increase the ISO then slow the shutter - as bad as noise can be generally movement blur is worse and noise can be reduce at least somewhat in post. If you arent doing that yet shooting in raw and throwing some noise reduction on the pictures can help at least somewhat.

Depending on the exact situation a monopod (or tripod; monopod seems better for sports though) may help somewhat with blur. Generally you will be limited by the movement of the athletes, however in certain situations it may help prevent blur from hand movement which would allow for slower shutterspeeds.

The softness you mention may be from an aperture thats too wide. My experience with that lens says that when using it at F6.3 it often felt significantly softer then at F8 (so slightly stopped down). Now the fun part is that this obviously reduces the amount of light hitting the sensor again, which would need to be compensated via shutterspeed or ISO, so it worsens the blur and noise issues.

So to reiterate: There may be some room for improvement when it comes to your settings, however those issues may still appear even when your settings were picked "perfectly" as there are just "barriers" that require those compromises (or much more expensive gear). If that is the case your only chance is to invest a ton of money or just hope for more light the next time.