How About Some Hoops
If you work in the newspaper business and shoot sports at all you know that basketball season is the one season that never seems to end. It is the longest of the prep sports beginning in November here in Alabama and going through until early March. And there are several games a week. This can lead to a lot of photos of the same thing. A jump shot here, a rebound there and it all starts to merge into one big, bouncing,orange blob.
How then do you stay fresh and keep your photos fresh? Ahh, there it is. Staying fresh in the midst of sameness. Is that the challenge of all community journalism? You cover some of the same events repeatedly whether sports or council meetings or festivals. Already you can see that the principles you are about to read will work for you in more than one venue. So hang on. The road to fresh photos begins in your head. Where else?
The easiest thing in the world is to do the job the same way over and over again, especially when you are getting acceptable results. Right? Well, that is right as long as you don’t want to get any better. If, however, your quest makes you push yourself harder and harder each day to make better pictures then you have a challenge. Begin by pretending you have never shot a basketball game before. Look around the gym and find the place where you think it might be cool to shoot from. Okay, there is a reason why most basketball is shot from the baseline. That is where the game “looks” right and you will probably get the highest percentage of good shots. Never the less, why not move around.
The photos in this post are just simplistic movement on my part to get high, get low and move around while still shooting from that high percentage zone. In the first photo, I am on a balcony that is absurdly close to the baseline in this gym. I am able to look almost straight down on the floor from this vantage point and it gives the feeling of a cool perspective without the expense and time of hanging a remote camera in the rafters. (If you shoot high school hoops on tight deadlines you already know that is not a real option anyway.)
The second photo shows a slightly elevated point of view. I got this by climbing to the top of a short set of bleachers in another gym. Why do this? It is as high as I can get in this gym and it has the advantage of clearing my sight lines of people walking in front of me along the baseline and usually helps keep the ref out of the photo. It also cleans up the background when shooting with a medium to long lens.
The third photo gives a perspective I get when shooting from my knees along the baseline. I was fortunate enough to have a good play happen literally three feet in front of me. I am down there right at their eye level and it is an angle people attending the game don’t usually get. Even if they do happen to see the play, it happens so fast that it gets lost in the whirl of the game.
The final perspective is from a camera literally sitting on the floor tipped slightly up. I shot this holding the camera on the floor but it could just as easily have been done by using a floor plate and a remote set up to fire the camera. It is a really simple shot that works sometimes and doesn’t sometimes. This is one of my more successful floor shots. I don’t rely on these but they do provide a nice variety to the long lens/tight shots that I usually look for.
The point is you have to try different things to get different results. A different lens or a different perspective or both will improve not only your pictures, but also your attitude when you have to do this two or three times a week. Have fun and get mobile.
Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
These are some great shots! I would be interested to learn about your lighting setup (if any) to get these type of shots …