Daily Grind – Week of Basketball

I’ve been on night shift this week shooting various regional basketball games. I made the decision to light most of the venues using SB-800 strobes at 45-degree angles to the top of the key. If you can get your lights high enough, you can produce some nice-looking images. However if you’re not careful, you can get some pretty ugly shadows. Sports Illustrated it ain’t but it will do on a budget. For the first part of the season I wasshooting Nikon D3′s with no lights, just the ISO cranked up. It was nice to be able to bang off a bunch of pictures though the downside was that the images looked kind of flat. So, I brought in the lights which give you a little punch but unfortunately kind of limit your movement as you can get some serious lens flare if you are not careful. With the state tournament coming up, I think I might go back to the no-light set-up if only because the pictures all look the same. Well lit maybe but definitely redundant. Anyway, here’s a slideshow of a week’s worth of high school hoops: