First Basketball Season - Varsity

Chasky

Thanks for checking out the thread.

Shot my first basketball season this winter. I was able to do a lot of the youth games, but recently got the chance to do the varsity team during playoffs. They played in a fieldhouse that's usually pretty well lit, but they turn out all the lights except for the ones directly above the court for varsity... still not bad, but made it more difficult for shots under the hoop.

These are my favorite shots from the three games.

All were shot with a Nikon D90, 70-200mm VR, f/2.8 at ISO 3200.













More photos as well as special effects open on my smugmug page...
proproductions.smugmug.com

C&C welcome and appreciated.

KMCC

Chasky wrote:

Thanks for checking out the thread.

Shot my first basketball season this winter. I was able to do a lot of the youth games, but recently got the chance to do the varsity team during playoffs. They played in a fieldhouse that's usually pretty well lit, but they turn out all the lights except for the ones directly above the court for varsity... still not bad, but made it more difficult for shots under the hoop.

These are my favorite shots from the three games.

All were shot with a Nikon D90, 70-200mm VR, f/2.8 at ISO 3200.

These are nice shots. You did well with the (typically) poor lighting found in high school gyms.

The only thing that I'd mention is that many of these shots are tilted slightly. Backgrounds should always be level.

I use any naturally occurring vertical line which appears in my images as points of reference (i.e. door frames, window frames, score boards, vertical edges of bleachers, etc). I rotate my images using Lightroom or Photoshop so that those points of reference are vertical. 90 degree vertical points of reference (as opposed to horizontal lines) will always be vertical regardless of the angle that you're shooting from.

I hope that makes sense.

Macushla

I think these are great!!! The are really clear and the action is totally stopped. I love the one with the boys on the bench and the one with the purple lightning is amazing. Would you mind sharing how you did that?

Chasky

KMCC wrote:

These are nice shots. You did well with the (typically) poor lighting found in high school gyms.

The only thing that I'd mention is that many of these shots are tilted slightly. Backgrounds should always be level.

I use any naturally occurring vertical line which appears in my images as points of reference (i.e. door frames, window frames, score boards, vertical edges of bleachers, etc). I rotate my images using Lightroom or Photoshop so that those points of reference are vertical. 90 degree vertical points of reference (as opposed to horizontal lines) will always be vertical regardless of the angle that you're shooting from.

I hope that makes sense.

This is just the kind of feedback I am looking for. I'll have to keep an eye on it now. Thank You.

Chasky

Macushla wrote:

I think these are great!!! The are really clear and the action is totally stopped. I love the one with the boys on the bench and the one with the purple lightning is amazing. Would you mind sharing how you did that?

Thanks. I use a Microsoft editing software currently. I cut out the background from the original photo, then went ahead and put in a black background behind them in another layer. To do the purple power surge/lightning I just did a few layers of purple circles and lines at different opacities, then went in with a distortion brush and smeared parts of each out until I got a decent balance. After that I put on a backlit filter to brighten parts of it up and then a diffused glow filter to get the highlights. There is also just some real fine highlighted edges around the boys. I just made copies of the image and moved them behind the original to put the highlight around those copies so it did not take over the original image. Hope this makes sense

Macushla

Chasky wrote:

Thanks. I use a Microsoft editing software currently. I cut out the background from the original photo, then went ahead and put in a black background behind them in another layer. To do the purple power surge/lightning I just did a few layers of purple circles and lines at different opacities, then went in with a distortion brush and smeared parts of each out until I got a decent balance. After that I put on a backlit filter to brighten parts of it up and then a diffused glow filter to get the highlights. There is also just some real fine highlighted edges around the boys. I just made copies of the image and moved them behind the original to put the highlight around those copies so it did not take over the original image. Hope this makes sense

That's a bit out of my league right now but maybe someday. Thanks for sharing.