December 30th, 2008 § § permalink
I photographed the last Raiders basketball game of 2008 at the Plymouth Pavilions last weekend which is always an interesting challenge; I’ve written on here in previous posts about the difficult conditions at the basketball arena; it’s pretty much dark in there, there’s no flash photography permitted, and yet you have to freeze the action of athletes competing in a very fast paced sport. For this game I used a 70-200 2.8 VRII Nikon lens on a D3 body and pushed the ISO out to 6400 to get a shutter speed of 1/500th and the images still look great; I don’t normally have the need to shoot at such a high ISO but it’s good to know that when it’s required I can still deliver high quality images even under the worst shooting conditions.
October 26th, 2008 § § permalink
It was the third home game of the season for the Plymouth Raiders at the Pavilions Basketball Arena last night and the team finally got their first win in front of the home crowd against the Guildford Heat with a slim four point lead at the close of the game. I’d never photographed basketball previously but I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on it already; the biggest problem being the terrible light in the arena (you’d think that a purpose built professional basketball arena would have great lighting… you’d be wrong) combined with the total ban on flash photography which prevents me from doing what I’d like to do which is to cross-light the court with a strobe on a high stand at each corner.
I enjoy a challenge however and a big part of being a working photographer is that you need to work around whatever issues are presented to you by the location (or subject… ho-ho) to produce great images for the client. To get around the light problems I ditched my usual sports set-up of a 70-200mm 2.8 and a 17-35mm 2.8 mounted on twin bodies and went with an 85mm 1.4 lens which gives me an extra two stops of light at the widest aperture and gets me the 500th of a second shutter speed required to freeze the action, at an acceptable 1000 ISO which renders the correct exposure while keeping the noise down to the level that ensures the images will reproduce well; the downside being that it lacks the range that I’m used to but the trade off is worth it.
In other Raiders news; some of the portraits that I shot of the players are now available as downloadable wallpapers at the Airwaves Plymouth Raiders website.
October 6th, 2008 § § permalink
Yesterday afternoon I headed over to the Plymouth Pavilions where the Raiders basketball team were playing their first home game of the season, to shoot some individual portraits of the players as well as the game itself (Plymouth Raiders guard Allistair Gall featured above). The light was pretty bad in the arena and flash photography was completely banned during play which made it pretty tough to get the shutter speed up high enough to freeze the action (ISO 3200/f2.8 to get 1/500th!) but I came out with some good images and expect to get even better shots when the Raiders play their next home game against the Newcastle Eagles, now knowing exactly what to expect from the light etc (this was my first time photographing indoor sports, normally specialising in outdoor sports photography; I enjoy a new challenge and it was kind of refreshing not to have to worry about mud/dust/rain/sun…).
