Week 14, Day 93, August 1, 2009 "Block Attempt"

My son's team played 3 games today at the Le Moyne College
Basketball tournament. They played quite well, and have a large team with a lot of great player. Coach Filzen works with them all summer in a summer league, and these tournaments, or basketball camps. His dedication to the sport and the team are incredible.

I've been taking sports photos for a while, and basketball is one of the most difficult. The lighting in many of the gyms is very poor for taking photos without a flash. But a flash is not a good thing to use because it can disrupt the game. (As depected in the funny commercial where a bar requests that a basketball game be sent into over time. I looked for the video of the commercial online, but couldn't find it.) The key things that I do for sport shooting is to set a high ISO (My camera does 1600). This causes the photos to look grainy, but there isn't anything I can do about that. I then set the white balance to either florescent or tungsten depending on the lighting in the gym. I then usually do aperture priority with a wide aperture. I usually start with 2.8, and then adjust it up until I'm getting a shutter speed of about 1/250 sec. I also set the auto focus into servo mode so that the camera adjusts the auto focus almost continuously. This is important because the scene changes so rapidly.

The final thing I do is just take a lot of photos. Usually I end up taking about 600-1000/game. There a lot that are poor, but every now and then I'll get an interesting one. I like this one.

Photo details: Exposure time 1/200 sec, Aperture f/2.8, ISO 1600, Focal Length 80 mm, 35 mm equivalent focal length 129 mm, Lens Canon 70-200mm f2.8L USM, hand held.