What makes photographing indoor sports difficult
- People running all over the place
- Indoor lights are not as bright as you would think (or hope)
- Need really both ‘fast’ wide and telephoto lenses
What you can do to increase your indoor basketball photography results
- Buy ‘fast’ lenses I.E. f/2.8 or faster, this will help keep your shutter speed up
- Turn up your ISO this will help keep your shutter speed up
- Take a lot of pictures, then when you review them you can throw a lot away and still end up with some great ones
- Learn your auto focus system
- Location, Location, Location, get yourself in position so you can get the shot
1. Buy “fast” lenses… he says buy fast lenses but what is a “fast” lens or what is “fast” glass? In short “fast” refers to the maximum aperture size your lens will open. The larger the aperture the more light your lens will let into and onto your cameras sensor. Aperture sizes are a numeric scale that represents the diameter of opening in the lenses iris. The larger the opening, the more amount of light will available to expose the image. The more light available for the exposure means we can use a higher shutter speed. With a higher shutter speed available, the less subject motion blur will occur and will minimize camera shake, thus the final image will be sharper.
Lenses have an opening inside the body that resembles the function and operation of your eyes iris. Like your eye’s iris, the lenses iris controls the amount of light that is allowed onto the camera’s sensor. The size of the opening is actually a ratio to the focal length of the lens. It’s a simple math equation.
F-number = Focal Length / Diameter of the iris
50mm lens with an aperture setting of f/2.8 the aperture size is 17mm …. 17mm is the actual physical size of the opening in the lens (iris) that allows light into the lens.
50mm lens with an aperture setting of f/1.4 the aperture size is 35mm …. 35mm is the actual physical size of the opening in the lens (iris) that allows light into the lens.
85mm lens with an aperture setting of f/1.4 the aperture size is 60mm …. 17mm is the actual physical size of the opening in the lens (iris) that allows light into the lens.
200mm lens with an aperture setting of f/2.8 the aperture size is 71mm …. 71mm is the actual physical size of the opening in the lens (iris) that allows light into the lens.
400mm lens with an aperture setting of f/2.8 the aperture size is 142mm …. 142mm is the actual physical size of the opening in the lens (iris) that allows light into the lens.
The math looks like this 400/2.8=142
142mm is big, That’s why the 400 f/2.8 lenses are so physically large.
2. Turning up your ISO will increase the amplification/sensitivity of the sensor. Making the sensor more sensitive will allow your shutter speed to increase. Using a higher ISO will allow you to work with a faster shutter speed in lower light situations. Typical ISO values are 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 and 3200. Newer cameras can go much higher in the ISO ranges and some of the recent changes can allow the cameras to do great things with low light.
As with all things, there is a down side to raising the ISO levels. The higher the ISO setting you start to introduce ‘noise’ into the image. Remember as you increase the ISO you are actually increasing the gain on analogue amplifiers. All things analogue contain the information you want and information you don’t want. When you turn up the amplification factor, you do increase the data you want AND increase the noise you don’t want. This noise seen in an image is sometimes “lovingly” called grain or texture and sometimes you do want to add grain or texture. Even then I want to add the grain or textures later in post processing by choice.
Another down side to increasing the ISO level is the loss of fine details in the image. The fine detail loss is really noticeable in the edges of objects, hair, eyes, small text, fabric patterns, faces in a crowd etc.
By now your thinking ok, ok, ok I get it, but what is noise? Show me this noise, grain, texture and the detail loss.
Below is a “clean” image, take at 100 iso. If you roll your mouse over the image, you will see a 3200 iso image with it’s noise in the hair on the left and detail loss in the hair as well.
3. The best way to end up with 10 good pictures is to start with 100 bad pictures. Taking 500 pictures at a family get together, party, wedding, hockey game/fight or any other setting may sound absolutely crazy, stupid and unnecessary. Well believe it or not, if you don’t actually take the pictures you wont end up with any. If you don’t have the shutter open when the smile is made or when the blood is flyin’ you wont have it captured. So go take the pictures, a lot of them, you cant sort through what you don’t have.
4.The auto focus system in the DSLR cameras can be your friend or your enemy. If you don’t know how to actually accurately use the auto focus functions of your camera body and lenses the final images will not be as good as they could be and you will miss a lot of images. When tracking moving objects the distance to the focal plane of the camera and that object will differ as the object moves. This change in distance will require focus adjustments to occur. If you don’t have full control over what your camera is doing you wont get what what you are hoping and in the end things won’t be as they should . A auto focus system gone awry will not get your intended subject sharp, it may pick the closest thing, it may pick a moving thing, the trees in the back ground the fence in the foreground whatever.
5. Location or point of view, camera position and angle, zoom and perspective all play a huge part of good photography. You have to push to the front, move into the area of action, ask for admittance, accidentally find yourself into the back of the area. make sure you are where you need to be. Make sure you bring your equipment and you know how to make it produce what you see.