Holiday Tournament Basketball

[jschoenr]

I had the opportunity to shoot at two local basketball tournaments over the past few days. Clicked off over 2000 shots according to my counter. All these shot with Canon 50D, 70-200mm f/2.8 @ f/2.8, 1/500-1/640 ISO between 2000 and 6400 depending on time of day and which gym. Using JohnG's advice on faces, here are some that I found interesting. C&C welcome!

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5. OK, not really a face shot, but all ball...


Time to give the girls some love...

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7.

[griffina6]

Very nice shots. Nice colors, good action, and faces too.

I do have a couple of questions. Did you shoot these in JPG or RAW? Was any noise reduction used. And did you use Custom White Balance (I have a gray card) or AWB?

I am going to see a friend's daughter play in a middle school tournament tomorrow over in Kernersville. I would love to get some shots close to the quality of yours. I have been debating about using the 85 1.8 but now after seeing your shots, I am going to start off with 70-200.

Thanks for sharing,
Andy

[jschoenr]

Hi Andy, thanks for commenting. I shoot in jpg - haven't really found the need to go RAW. For post-processing, I use Picasa for basic cropping, straightening, sharpen, and color corrections. I also use Noiseware for noise reduction. I do use custom white balance and over the course of the tournament tried a cheap shoot through filter and using Kelvin scale in camera. I also used the WB manual adjustment in camera to fine tune.

Good luck with your shoot. My advice is to shoot wide open with the 70-200 and keep increasing ISO (don't be afraid of 6400 - just be sure to have good exposure and use noise reduction) to get your shutter speed up to at least 1/400th. If you can't get there, then switch to the 85mm - of course you'll be really limited in the types of shots you get as the acceptable focus range is really only about 15 ft and inside that range it's tough to get a full body in the frame. One thing I've noticed with my 50D is when I look at the display, shots appear about 2/3 to 1 stop brighter than they do on my computer screen, so I purposely slightly under-expose in camera to compensate.

Middle School girls is another challenge. Not alot of acrobatics and quite a lot of bunching up under the basket. Good luck and please post your results.

[griffina6]

Jason, thanks for the tips.

Originally Posted by jschoenr

My advice is to shoot wide open with the 70-200 and keep increasing ISO (don't be afraid of 6400 - just be sure to have good exposure and use noise reduction) to get your shutter speed up to at least 1/400th.

I will definitely go this route. Hopefully, the 85 can take the day off since it will be during daylight hours.

Originally Posted by jschoenr

One thing I've noticed with my 50D is when I look at the display, shots appear about 2/3 to 1 stop brighter than they do on my computer screen, so I purposely slightly under-expose in camera to compensate.

I am not sure I follow the point about purposely underexposing if the camera is 2/3 to 1 stop brighter on the LCD display than the computer screen (what about prints?)? I am thinking the LCD image is sometimes brighter than the image on the computer screen and I have tried to address this by lowering the LCD brightness but it is so subjective. I will usually look first at the histogram then try to adjust further based on the image in the LCD screen.

The good thing about tomorrow is there is no pressure as I am mainly going to watch some friends play (some girls I coached in our rec league until they made the school team) and once again get more experience with the camera and a few good shots would be a bonus.

I will post some if anything comes out decent.

Thanks again,
Andy

[schent1]

Originally Posted by jschoenr

One thing I've noticed with my 50D is when I look at the display, shots appear about 2/3 to 1 stop brighter than they do on my computer screen, so I purposely slightly under-expose in camera to compensate.

I think you have some real good action shots here and it is really good to see the faces.

I am certainly no expert, but nearly all of these images look under exposed to me. I think you need to print a couple and determine what you are going to trust for the exposure and determine if the camera or computer is a more accurate representation.

[JohnG]

I agree with schent1. You've got some nice action here but they're underexposed. WB may or may not be off - it's somewhat difficult to tell when the shots are underexposed. The action and sharpness are there but you need to get the exposures up about a stop so you can see the faces.

[jschoenr]

Thanks for the comments everyone. As usual, very helpful. I took them into account and hopefully did better in my last volleyball shoot - I'm posting those in another thread...

[wolverines]

[QUOTE=jschoenr;1033923]
Good luck with your shoot. My advice is to shoot wide open with the 70-200 and keep increasing ISO (don't be afraid of 6400 - just be sure to have good exposure and use noise reduction) to get your shutter speed up to at least 1/400th.QUOTE]

When he says to use noise reduction, what does that mean?

Thanks,

BP

[Mark1616]

Originally Posted by wolverines

When he says to use noise reduction, what does that mean?

Thanks,

BP

Noise is inherent in higher ISO shots and there are specialist software products out there to remove this.

I use noiseware and here is a link to their site that gives some examples http://www.imagenomic.com/nwsamples.aspx

NoiseNinja is the other big player in this space (there are others).

[wolverines]

Sorry to sound ignorant. So....noise is something you see and not hear?