This weekend I had the opportunity to shoot a girls varsity basketball game at the local high school. Some of you know I have another website where I shoot some sports as a way to help pay some of the photography equipment. This summer and fall I got to shoot a bunch of HS soccer in addition to my baseball shooting. You can see some of the soccer results here. As a result, I got a request to shoot the the girls varsity basket ball too.
Honestly, the thing is…when I agreed to shoot the basketball games I didn’t know what I’d do because I’ve really never shot in a gym and gotten anything worth a darn. The entire bucket of problems with bad lighting, weird white balance and everything else had kept me from trying much inside. Most of what I’d done was baseball, soccer, and other outdoor sports but it is COLD here and I wanted to shoot. So, I took the opportunity, set some low expectations telling the parents I’d try and but not to expect much.
So, I went to my best resource and searched Strobist.com. There I found this post - Speedlighting a College Gym. Turns out, I’ve got all the gear to make this happen. I’ve got two strobes, clamps, some bungees, and a few eBay poverty wizards to work with. (When is this Hobby guy gonna make me quit ripping him off?). I wasn’t able to mount them exactly as Dave did in his post though. I had them both shooting from one side of the gym from a booth where they do filming of games. I met some of the support staff and they were really cooperative so I hope next time to be able to get them aimed from two corners of the gym. There was a cage that held a clock in the past and I think it will be a nice place to put the second light. With two lights on opposite corners the spread would have to be better distributed than what I got today.
Here is the diagram of how I was set up. Blue lights represent what I did today. The green light is where I want to be next time. BTW – these were shot with a Nikon D300 using a 70-200 2.8 Sigma at ISO 1250 and shot at 200 or 250 shutter. There is some noise at that ISO.
The results aren’t absolutely what I hoped for but I’m pretty happy with my first try. The color balance still wasn’t what I hoped for but but it was correctable in Lightroom and it came out okay. My favorite shot of the day was actually a player for the opposing team. I have several more games coming up and I’ll work on tweaking the system until I can get it right.
I had some pretty good ones of the home team too though…
This one is not a great picture but it shows the amazing power of two little speedlights aimed over the floor at the FAR end of the gym. See the shadows against the wall? That’s a long way from those speedlights but they did it.
Next week I get another chance to shoot another home game. I’m looking forward to tweeking the lights and see what I can get some improvements. Stay tuned for the results of next weeks game.
