PShizzy: The Blog

Before we begin, I explicitly asked permission to post the following message. I will not disclose the identity of the person asking the question, unless they ask me to. I plan to make this a series on my blog, where I offer my honest opinion and insight on a photography related question posed to me. Remember though, these are just opinions, not hard rules. Feel free to email me or contact me privately, and I’d be glad to answer your questions in a future post.

Without further ado:

Hi Max,

I see your work often and it’s spectacular. I shoot lots of soccer and lacrosse and have limited experience with basketball.

I’d greatly appreciate some advice from you.

My son is playing on an AAU Basketball team and the coaches want me to shoot games this weekend. I’ve done a few tourneys with my 1D Mark IIN using F/2.8L 70-200. I don’t travel with strobes and don’t see it practical at the U-15 level, especially if I’m not intending to sell images to families.

That said, are there any circumstances where you shoot any basketball games w/o strobes in dingy lit basketball gyms?

The noise is killing me. I do use CS3 and it helps, but still want less noise.

Any suggestions on lens selection?

My options are:
- 50mm f/1/8
- 70-200mm f/2.8L
- 200mm F/2.0L (rented this weekend to attempt better results)
- 24-70mm F/2.8L
- 16-35mm F/2.8L

Most often use 70-200 F/2.8L wide open, 1600 ISO using Manual setting between at 320-500 SS.

Thanks in advance.

Hi there. First off thanks for writing. Your situation is pretty common, what with the lighting that’s common in smaller gymnasiums. You’ve already crossed out the idea of strobes, and especially with traveling, this can be inconvenient. The mk2n is a great camera, so not much room for improvement there (though I do love my mk3s, I can’t recommend you going out and spending 4k, yet)

Your lens selection looks fine for most sports, but under extremely bad lighting, it seems you’re sorely lacking in the fast prime department. the 50 1.8 is a pretty good and fast prime given it’s cost, but it just can’t keep up with high action easily due to its antiquated focusing motor.

The 200 2.0 seems like a good rental to me. I’d see where my exposure falls with the shutter at 1/500th at f/2.0 at ISO 1600. If you can get away with less than 1600 ISO, that’s great. Some people opt to bump up the aperture so as to get slightly more depth of field, but I wouldn’t in this case. Because the 200 would be a far court lens, and because you’ll be cropping into the image due to the focal length, you’ll have plenty of DOF at 2.0. Lowering the ISO would help you because the cleaner image would lend itself to deeper cropping without as much loss of quality.

For the nearcourt lens, your choices depend on the position you like to sit in when covering basketball. I tend to plant myself as close to the basket as possible, to the right of the backboard, because most players attack the basket from the right (being right handed), which means they face you more often on their drives to the hoop. The caveat to this is that this vantage point is also popular with the referees, so you may lose shots when they block your line of sight.

In this situation, you really need a short prime. Taking price, aperture, and autofocus speed into consideration, the 85 1.8 is the best choice. It’s a ring type Ultrasonic Motor, in the 300-400 dollar range, and a fast 1.8 aperture. Your other choices all fail to meet all three requirements.

the 24 and 35 1.4 and 50 1.2 are all L lenses, offering fast apertures and ring USM. But they’re all in the 1K plus price range.

The 50 1.8 and 35 2.0 use the oldest motor, the Arc Form Drive. They are cheap, and fast aperture, but the autofocus is slow and noisy. As in don’t use it at a wedding noisy.

The 50 1.4 is a fast aperture lens in the same price range as the 85, but the 50 1.4 offers a different type of USM, known as micro USM. It’s quiet, and better than AFD, but it’s not as good as a true Ultrasonic motor.

For more info on Canon AF motors, go to
http://photo.net/photo/canon/lens-motors

At nearcourt, your DOF will be very shallow at 1.8. I’d consider going to 1/500th, 1.8 and ISO 1600. depending on where your exposure lies, I’d bump up the aperture and lower the ISO equally (so if I was 2/3 overexposed at 1/500th 1.8 1600, I’d go to 1/500th 2.0 1250). At this point you have some leeway with your exposure. You could easily keep it at 1.8 and just lower the ISO to get the exposure right and maintain a clean image. It’s up to you.

But, I would not at any point consider lowering the shutter below 1/500th when shooting action. While there are programs that can fix image noise (Noise Ninja, Neat Image, Noiseware, the list is endless), there is no way to fix motion blur in post without severely reducing the image size. Even then, the results are lackluster.

What I will do, at times, is lower the shutter as well as the ISO (to offset each other) during slower, non-action moments in the game. These are, as an example: free throws (which are boring safety shots, but sometimes necessary), coach and player huddles, player-player interaction, etc. In these cases, I can easily lower the shutter down as low as 1/125th, which gives me 2 stops to use on ISO or aperture. Going down to ISO 400 or 500 gives you a very clean image, and if the moment captured is right, that’s just a great combination.

But be sure to go back up to your action settings quickly once the ball is in play again.

I’m sorry for the length of the post, but I wanted to cover all the bases, and explain my choices. In summary (both for you, and for anyone else reading who wants to cut to the chase)

• the 200 2.0 will be excellent wide open for farcourt action
• the 85 1.8 is your best overall choice for nearcourt action
• keep that shutter speed up for action. You can fix noise in post, you can’t fix motion blur.
• Selectively lower the shutter and ISO for non action moments.

I hope this has been informative. If you or anyone has any further questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments, and I will get to them promptly, schedule permitting.

Max

Tags: equipment, photography // 2 Comments »