Reaction!

The game was full of action.  Trent Wiedeman was back in action this week and made a presence for himself underneath the basket.

In the end, the Spartans took the 6-AA Region Championship and advanced to the State tournament, which starts tonight.

Basketball has a lot of repetition to the game flow.  Drive, shoot, rebound, retreat.  If you photograph from the same viewpoint, you end up with repetitive images.

One concept I’ve had in mind after the first weekend was to catch a high flying player in isolation (or maybe with a second player) going up for a layup, dunk or rebound against the backdrop of the student section.  Unfortunately, GAC’s Trent Wiedeman missed tonight’s game so I was left without the tallest man on the floor.  I was also short a few student’s in the student section as the school’s winter break started Friday.

I shot from the opposite end of the floor with the 300/f2.8.

I’m always on the look out for anything that shows the team together, getting ready for the game.

Boxing out for the rebound on a free throw, this time shot from mid-court:

And finally, on defense and using the opponent’s point guard to help frame up my subject:

The umbrellas disappeared this week against Westminster, but was replaced by a lot of banter traded with the visiting team.

The Long Forum is Greater Atlanta Christian’s new 3,000 seat multi-purpose arena.  With video screens, real seating, high tech lighting the building is the ultimate in high school sporting facilities.  Game day finally arrived after years of planning.

Since lighting has been a reoccurring topic on this blog and is always a first thought in a photographer’s mind, I’ll mention that the lighting is a substantial improvement over the average gymnasium.  The color produced by the lights is constant over the entire floor area and over time.

I worked a little differently during the games to try and catch different angles and backgrounds.  I wanted to show some of the pieces of the building.

Side court also afforded an opportunity to work on a creative pan of the action as it moved up court.  This photograph was at 1/20 of a second, substantially longer than the 1/400 of a second everything else was captured at.

One end of the arena has seats that extend all the way to just outside the baseline.  It gives a collegiate atmosphere that can be a large part of the image….

or a smaller part.

Of course this was all in the context of a game, as Greater Atlanta Christian guard Paul Dawson cuts and drives to the basket.

I actually photographed three different games in two different gymnasiums last Friday – first the Girls Varsity match in the main Gymnasium, followed by the 9th Grade and JV Boys games in the lower school gymnasium.  As I needed to be mobile, I kept to on-camera lighting.  However, I used my Bogen Manfrotto 233B Flash bracket on my main camera body to get my flash high off of the camera to reduce the occurence of red eye and help make the light a little more natural.

As with Football, the flash is used to create the “Stop Action” needed for a crisp photograph.  1/4 Power on the Canon 550EX was all that was needed to give enough light at the closer ranges that basketball is photographed at.  It allowed for use of ISO400 and a more narrow aperture (f4 to f5.6, depending on proximity to play) to allow more depth of field using the 70-200 zoom.