If you arent shooting raw use the lowest contrast you can set. That gives you the best dynamic range. You will probably have to tweak the contrast back up with levels or curves, but you have a choice of what to give up. Use raw if you have it unless the cycle times cause you to miss shots..

Use flash for group shots and such. It fills in the shadows. Of course that doesnt help for the baseball game unless you have a humongous flash unit..

Other than the lens hood there isnt much you can do. Midday sun exceeds the dynamic range of most cameras and you will have dark shadows if you dont blow the highlights. With a live histogram you can use EV shift to get the highlights right. With a DSLR you probably want to shoot with a slightly negative EV or bracket the EV..

If you dont blow the highlights you can do a lot in post processing. Shadow/Highlight in Photoshop can help. If you dont have Photoshop there is a technique called contrast masking that gives a similar result in other programs...

Unfortunately, the things that you can do are limited, because of the event itself. Outside of sporting events, you can (and should) use fill flash or a diffusing material between the sun and your subject. You can also reposition them to be in the shade..

But you can't do any of that. All you can do is lower the contrast and hope the lens hood cuts out flare. Oh, and try to position yourself so that the sun is beating down on your scalp, not your forehead. But this is not much help..

In post-processing, you can play around with the shadow/highlight controls and - if you have Lightroom or CS3 and shoot RAW - you have the fill light control that will help somewhat.You name it, I've broken it...

Any other suggestions? Possibly using a neutral density filter?..

An ND filter won't do anything but cut down the amount of ALL the light coming into the lens. Not really useful here..

There isn't a cure for all photos. Some things we can control. Some we can't. Mid day action is one of those that is pretty much shot as is. But don't worry about. Just worry about the great action that is going on.

Well, with basketball they do have strobes in the rafters but that's another story. The main thing is to get the shot. Your not shooting portraiture here. Every sports shooter is under the same conditions. Perhaps longer and better lenses but, make do with what you got..

But, you may get lucky and get a cloudy day. That WILL help the contrast a lot!.

Mike.

'Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.'..

Ace3 wrote:.

Any other suggestions? Possibly using a neutral density filter?.

Nope. You'll still have the same squinty panda faces and washed out buildings and landscapes, just exposed at f/5.6 instead of f/11..

You name it, I've broken it...

Ditto on nixing the neutral density filter. Hoping for cloudy days would be more practical..

Odds are your son's games aren't all or played in their entirety at astrological noon. So the sun's at some sort of angle. I point this out because even a little backlighting can cause even more trouble than it's worth..

Aside from that, why not just concentrate on the action. No, you're not going to get perfectly exposed faces but is that really the end of the world?.

Go out, have fun, experiment a little with, maybe spot metering the face up under the helmet shadow then flipping over to manual to preserve that reading and see if that washes out the rest of the image too much for you..

Most of all, have fun. Remember, all your son's games could be say at night under lights then you'd still be dealing with shadow concerns and asking about fast zooms vs. primes..

'Nice pen, bet you write good stories with it.'..