2017-11-11 Back to Basketball!

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Basketball is one of my favorite sports to photograph. For an adrenaline junkie the speed of basketball, with its spontaneous changes of directions, fakes and split second decisions, keeping up with the action takes agility and speed. It's great to have a home team like the Villanova Wildcats, because they have been great competitors over the past recent years. This year their home games will be played at the Wells Fargo Center as their usual home turf undergoes a transformation.

Here's Villanova Wildcats guard Mikal Bridges (25), determined to get past Columbia Lions forward Myles Hanson (31) during the game between the Columbia Lions and the Villanova Wildcats last night at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia.

Nikon D4 Sigma 50mm f/1.4 art @ 1/1600 sec f/3.2 ISO 2000

Through the Glass

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.

Basket Level

Basketball, from a photographer’s standpoint, has some interesting challenges, not the least of which is positioning. Being along the base line gives opportunities for some great shots as guards and forwards charge down court, but pictures of action at the basket are difficult. For one thing the hoop is ten feet from the floor and even if I could jump that high there’s lots of things in the way, the backboard and the support system being the major things. One way to try and get around this conundrum is to point a remote camera at the basket at some angle that could possibly catch the ball, and a face or two, doing something awesome at the specific place we all think of when we think of basketball. So my idea last night was to point a camera, with a long zoom lens, towards the side of the basket, at the same height as the basket. (This isn’t new, but it’s the first time I’ve attempted it.) I learned a lot from the escapade and I did manage to get a few keepers from it. This one is my favorite.

Nikon D7000 Sigma 300mm f/2.8 @ 300mm f/3.2 ISO 4000 1/1000 sec.