First time Basketball shots C&C

c_pass · Jul 24, 2011

Took the camera out to one of my basketball games (I'm recovering from a injury)

I read up on lighting in gyms and came to the understanding that I need a F2.8 lens to get some decent pics.
I dont have that so I went with what I had.

I shot in Shutter priority (I wanted to get some shots of the action stopped and let the camera deal with everything else)

From the shots, these are my fav.

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

Image 4

Image 5

Image 6

NCAFLeo88 · Jul 24, 2011

Nothing too terribly interesting here. They all look rather snapshottish...

patrick0294 · Jul 24, 2011

It would look pretty cool if you had a longer shutter speed to express the motion in the player.

Malone · Jul 24, 2011

WB could use some tweaking on a few..

Tony S · Jul 24, 2011

Basketball inside is tough without the expensive lenses or off camera lighting.

Exposure is key for shooting basketball inside. Get the camera off of TV mode or any auto mode. If you need to shoot a few shots to give you a starting point and then got to manual and make some minor tweeks from there. That will give you more consistancy between shots and not let jersey colors, light and dark, throw the camera meter off. Once you find an exposure that works well nder the baskets go with that. You will still get some shots that don't look right, often times that is because you have taken a shot of the subject in a "hole" where the lights don't quite cover the court. It looks like it visually, but where the light really falls is really spotty. And then exposure and white balance with be thrown off occasionally when you catch the lights between cycles ij the flicker rate, I hate it when that happens. Go ahead and crank your ISO up, a noisy well exposed picture always looks nicer than an underexposed picture that gets noisy when you raise the exposure in post processing.

Like it was mentioned above by Malone, the white balance is off. Try to set yourself a custom white balance once you get your exposure set. Of course this is not giong to work perfectly because lighting in gyms sucks, old lights are mixed with new lights and even different types of lights, and then again that hole where the light does not cover the court the way you think it does.