I am always amazed by the number of paintball photographers who never venture beyond the automatic settings on their cameras. The only way to truly become great photographer is to learn and master the settings on the camera and move away from the automatic “point and shoot” settings. This is after all why you bought that big expensive digital SLR camera instead of a point and shoot camera.
I use all sorts of camera settings depending on what I am trying to do and the conditions on the field. The automatic settings are good for beginning photographers but once you learn about light and relationship between shutter speed, aperture, depth of field, and ISO you will learn what works best.
I frequently shoot in something I call ISO priority; I am constantly changing the ISO setting on the camera in either program mode, aperture mode, or shutter speed mode to get the settings I want.
I usually shoot high resolution JPEGs most of the time because this format maximizes the speed at which the camera can take pictures. In paintball photography speed is everything. For indoor events, team and event pictures I always shoot in RAW format because you have so much more control over white balance and other setting during post processing