Lighting For Sports
A bunch of prep sports need lighting. Basketball, football, volleyball, soccer and some of you cold weather guys may have to light hockey too. God help you if you dare pull out a strobe to try and shoot night baseball! That is, apparently, the unpardonable sin alongside attempting to light a gymnastics event. I had to shoot some volleyball in a really dark gym this week so I thought I would do a post on it. Most of the time, lighting for high school basketball is pretty easy if not always convenient. Volleyball has a twist. The courts are two up on a basketball court so you can’t set lights in the corners of the gym and just bang away.
I puzzled over this for a while before deciding on shooting in one direction only. I set my primary light on a balcony above the court and at the net so the strobe is about twenty feet above the court. I set the second light at about where mid-court would be on the basketball court aimed back toward the net. This forced me to shoot from either the balcony or at court level from behind one team. I just had to make sure I was shooting at the team I needed photos of. It worked out okay, not great, but okay. (I would post a diagram here but I am just beginning to learn how to use Illustrator. Use your imagination.)
For me, the most significant drawback is the inability to use a motor drive sequence. This means it is back to being a photographer who depends on his timing to get the job done. That is satisfying as long as my timing is on that day. It can be pretty frustrating when my timing is off. My camera set up was a D2Hs with an 80-200 f2.8. I had both strobes set to 1/4 power and ISO rating on camera of 1000. The exposure was 1/250th f2.8 at ISO 1000. As a side note here, volleyball can be one of those touchy sports regarding flash. Some places don’t let you shoot flash so you have to be flexible from arena to arena. I have done this available darkness and turned in some horribly grainy images. Bottom line, if they won’t let you strobe you just have to do the job the best you can without it.
There is a terrible limitation for many digital cameras when shooting flash action. The shutter speed limit is 1/250th which can allow some ghosting depending on the ambient light. The Nikon D1 and, I believe, the Canon EOS 1D allowed 1/500th because both cameras used a CCD type image sensor. Most of the new pro digital cameras use a CMOS image sensor. The CCD could be turned on and off just to record the exposure so the mechanical shutter was a non-factor. The CMOS sensor requires a continuous flow of power and a manual shutter has to be used which limits you to the 1/250th. That is a very poor technical explanation but it will serve until someone with greater knowledge than me can post a more detailed explanation.
Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions in this blog are my own and don’t necessarily reflect those of my employer.
In the D1, the CCD was turned off, so that it could be used as an electronic shutter. That’s why it could also use a shutter speed of 1/16000s. If I recall correctly, the Nikon D70 had a similar arrangement, and the mechanical shutter always exposed at 1/90s when the shutter speeds were above that, and the shorter speeds were all achieved with the electronic shutter.
Love your work and your willingness to share. Came across the link below that can be used for diagramming lighting setups. You may already know about it, but it may be easier than learning Illustrator if you haven’t.
Keep up the good work and thank you for sharing.
http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic2/446987
Dain
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