I have practically no experience shooting sports but I had the chance to shoot the Huntington High dream team this evening. (The yellow T-shirts say "Our Dream Team, Your Worst Nightmare". I'll say, the score was 40-96 against Cabell-Midland High) It was fun to try out my 18-200 VR lens on this. Basketball is a lot more difficult than birds. I shot hundreds of shots and got just a handful of decent action shots. I need more experience.
6 comments:
Did you see the shout out Glenn Reynolds gives you in his review of the lens in Popular Mechanics?
(If I were HTML savvy, I'd provide the link but I'm not so I can't though I guess I could do it old school: go to Instapundit and scroll down to his post about his review of the lens in Popular Mechanics for the article link. You're mentioned near the end.)
Congratulations!
It makes you really appreciate those shots in Sports Illustrated. Of course, this is one instance where equipment does make a difference. Those guys have lenses that cost more than my car.
Hi Pete, yes, I saw that. My Sitemeter sure noticed too.
Jerry... this brings up an interesting point about shooting basketball... the ONLY way to get those great SI style shots is to light the arena with flash. They will typically go and spend (insert a long time here... I don't know how much time) hanging many strobes from the ceiling and running electricity to the strobes and running sync wires. The whole thing is then synced via wireless remote on the camera. It's a huge undertaking but that's the way they shoot indoor arena sports such as basketball and hockey. That being said, it's surely possible to get much better shots (and a better percentage of good shots) using existing light than what I got yesterday. The Memorial Field House is not lit well. If it had more and better and more modern lighting, the outcome would have been better. I also have no experience about such things as for instance, where should I be positioned to shoot a certain player who is right handed or left handed and where should I be for a foul shot, etc., etc.
The Popular Mechanics article was written by Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit. He's a law prof at the Univ of Tennessee and has one of the most popular blogs in the country. He has linked to me several times in the past... usually resulting in a traffic spike in the thousands. The spike is referred to as an "Instalanche". I like how Scott Ott defined that: 'Instalanche'... is "a brief but powerful spike in blog traffic, generated by a link from InstaPundit.com, which creates in the affected blogger a fleeting sense of euphoria and heightened self-esteem, followed by weeks of doubt and progressive self-loathing."
Rick I left a note on my blog http://tomhindman.blogspot.com/2007/03/caption-contest.html.
But here is what I said.....I went and took a look & that is a nice shot. When I first came to Charleston the folks at the Civic Center thought I was nuts when I came down the day before to set up Norman strobes in the cat walks. Now you can''t even use a flash on camera thanks to the SSAC. But I am about to go off on a rant so let me get back on track. For me sharing is what makes photography so wonderful. I shoot on manual at a shutter speed of 400, asa 800. I purposely underexpose 1 stop. In Photoshop I first sharpen 60/20 and leave threshold blank or on 0. I then do an overall brightness/contrast. Then I crop. Now most gurus will dispute this and tell ya that you will get better resullts doing this as the last steps, not so. I then correct the color slightly altho I try to that in camera but with different outputs from the lights above you get shifts on the court so this is needed. Just a side note here rather than use a white balance I use a grey card on location. And last I use noise ninja only very slightly along with smart blur, again very slighty. And with the history brush I go in and localize areas that have pulled apart....or picked up noise. I have a hot key I call start to finish that sometimes does it all, but it doesn't work on all images.
Wow... a 400th/sec?? I was using ISO800 at 1/50th sec in the Field House and it still needed to be lightened up some. I could have drastically increased my sharp shots if I had gone to ISO1600 or 3200 but I was really afraid of just getting mushy grainy crap. I think I made a bad decision. I think I'll try to get in the Civic Center for the tourney and see what I can get under the better lighting.
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