Continuing in the basketball themed posts (mostly because it’s winter and it’s the majority of pictures I’m taking right now) I thought I would take a moment to share one more vantage point from a basketball game. I’ve had basketball photography explained to me as being all about the angles. If you think about it logically, action sports photography usually has two specific elements in a picture, action and emotion. To simplify this idea, usually that means a face and a ball need to be in the picture for most sports. Having limited access to positioning in most venues can make getting in positions to photograph an athlete's face while he or she is performing their sport rather difficult. One place in basketball is while a player is attempting to dunk. The ball in an outstretched arm and a frontal view of the athlete's face are visible if you look through the backboard. Obviously this takes some preparation and there’s a limited amount of risk to equipment, but when it works out, the picture can tell a unique story. Here’s a few pictures of the rigging I used to hang a Nikon D7000 behind the backboard last night. The lens is a Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 so mounted on the camera it was set as wide as it could go. With the cropping factor that equates to about 24mm.

I got a few good ones, but here’s my favorite.