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 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…).
