Basketball Practice

My next for sure job will be photographing kids in a venue that I have been told is poorly lit for photography.  I happened to be driving past the venue this weekend and I saw that something was going on in there.  So I went in and asked for permission to practice taking photographs.

I was able to take about 85 photos before the woman who let me in became concerned about the volume of my photos.  She told me she would have charged to let me in if she known that I was going to take more than one or two photos.  I took that as my cue to leave. Get in, get out, avoid drama.  I'm glad I got in, but I wish I could have stayed a little bit longer.

I learned that to photograph basketball I need to use continuous focus, later at home I learned about back button focus and I like it.  I will use back button focus when photographing basketball.  Here are a few of my pictures that turned out okay.  I used my external flash on camera in a soft box.  The ceiling is high and brown, so bouncing off the ceiling is not an option.

 I shot in manual mode, since the lighting was uniform.  I settled on 1/500 and ISO 12,500.  I was having trouble focusing so I kept my F stop mostly at 2.2 and higher.  Now that I know about continuous back button focus I will try F1.8 again.  I think most of my focusing problems had to do with the focus method rather than the depth of field.

I used my 55mm 1.8 prime lens for these, on my crop sensor that is equivalent to an 85mm lens.  This gym is very dark and basketball players move fast, so my 3.5-5.6 zoom lenses  never got to come out the bag here.

I have a new lens on the way, a Sigma 17-50mm f/2.8 EX DC OS HSM FLD Large Aperture Standard Zoom Lens for Nikon Digital DSLR Camera.  How about that alphabet soup?