In looking to strobe my first basketball game, I did a lot of research on the web about setting up the lights, exposure, approaching game officials, etc… I didn’t find much that was updated in the last year or so. In fact, most of what I found was circa, 2005-2009. Maybe people don’t strobe as often, or the ones that do already know what they are doing. So with that, I thought I would document my first basketball lighting adventure for others to see and learn…or if you have comments, or suggestions for something better, that would be great as well.

THE PLANNING

Here is the gym. It’s the Edgewood ISD Gym on the south side of San Antonio. It’s old, poorly lit with an extremely low ceiling.

Old gym…but an immaculate gym. The game will be a rivalry game between Memorial and Kennedy. I contacted the Edgewood ISD athletic director and asked him if I could use strobes during this game and he said it wouldn’t be a problem. Some of the research I did stated I should get this permission and I also planned to inform the coaches and referees I’d be strobing as well, just so everyone knows what’s going on. There is a JV game before the varsity, so I knew I would have an entire game to get used to shooting with strobes and such.

I went to scout the gym to see where I could set up my lights. I initially thought I would use my 12′ light stands, setting them up in the corners by the exit doors (pictured above). The athletic director told me there is no crowd traffic there during games. My fear however was that although the stands would be out of the way of players, they wouldn’t be out of the way of an errant pass. Although I thought I could zip-tie them to the electrical conduit, I looked for other options.

The gym has an upper mezzanine where the stands are and figured if I could bracket the strobe on the railing (see above), it would be out of the way of any traffic, plus there is a convienent outlet on the wall, below the walk way.

Here is a shot from the top of the key looking back at the upper mezzanine railing (by the trash can) I planned on using. Just down the wall in front of the railing is an outlet, so I was hoping to mount the light there and simply run the power cord to that outlet…everything out of the way of any players or fans.

This is the diagram…I’m planned on aiming them at the top of the key, then up at a 45-degree angle.

I’ll be using my Interfit EXD400 monolights mounted by super clamps and remote triggering them with Pocket Wizards (Plus X); shooting from the baseline where there is plenty of room to shoot as long as there aren’t any cheerleaders there.

THE SET-UP

The JV game started at 5:00pm, so I showed up at 4:00pm to get set up just in case I ran into problems.  Setup went better than expected. I had the lights mounted in about 15 minutes. I used a piece of rope simply to tie the mono light to the railing, just in case something happened and the light fell of the clamp. This mounting we clean and pretty easy.

Here is a shot from the opposite side of the court with the strobes going off.

Then I went on to set my exposure. I initially set the mono lights to 1/4 power, then played around with my camera settings during the shoot-around. This first shot was at 1/400, f/3.2, ISO 800. You can see the sync speed was obviously off.

I also didn’t like the white balance, so I switch to straight Kelvin setting of 5000, then set my shutter speed right to 1/200.

So, the next shot was better (below), but I still saw a bit of darkness on the right side of the image. I really wasn’t sure what it was. I tried a couple other shutter speeds thinking the sync speed with the mono light was off, but I always still had that darker edge on the image. But, when I shot landscape, the darkness went away.

So it was only when I shot in portrait is when I got the dark edge.

Once I removed the lens hood, the darkness on the right side went away…I have no explanation for that, so if anyone knows why that would happen, please let me know. shot portrait where I had the darkness on the right edge. So, I tried to remove the lens hood, as I usually leave it on just really to protect the lens when shooting so close to the action.

So, I’m done setting up the strobes, I messed with my exposure settings and settle on the following (1/200, f/4, ISO 640, WB 5000).

Total time to set all that up…35 minutes.

SHOOTING THE GAME

Prior to starting with the JV game, I spoke with both coaches and explained I was going to use strobes on one end of the court. I also told them that if any of their players complained about it, to please let me know and I’ll stop using them. Both coaches were OK with it. I looked for the refs to explain to them as well, but they were no where in sight until right before the game started…so it wasn’t a couple minutes into the game and one of the refs came up to me and asked that I turn them off.  I explained to him I had permission from the AD and coaches, but he said, “the score keeper asked to have them turned off.”

So, I simply took my camera off the court and set it on top of my bag, then started checking my phone. While I’m doing this, the ref looked to speak with both the coaches and an administrator behind the score table. After a couple minutes, he gave me the thumbs-up to continue.

As I’m shooting, if found it much different than shooting straight ambient light. This is because you really need to shoot in single salvo mode to give the strobes time to regenerate power. Because you’re shooting single shots, focus became an issue. I had my camera on AF-C (I shoot a Nikon D600), so continuous AF mode. Yet, as I moved from player to player, I found the auto focus was not quick enough to focus before I shot. So, I tried to follow a player, rather than the ball. This helped, but still not great.  When looking at the LCD screen, the images looked well exposed and focused, but I know from experience I wouldn’t really know until I got to look at them in full-resolution at home. So, I continued…

Once both games were complete, I began the tear-down. All-in-all, it took less than 15 minutes to break it all down and pack it.

POST PROCESSING

When I got home and looked at the images, I found my focus was off more than I thought. I needed to hold the focus on the player probably a split second longer to get the clean crisp focus. I would say 2/3 of my shots were not print worth (or Maxpreps worthy)…good for Facebook…yes, but not much more.

Here is good representation of what I was getting:

 

So you can see…it’s really close, but not really tack-sharp on the shooter’s face. This is me just moving too late and not keeping up with the action very well.

Here is one where I held focus on the player and ended up being a nice shot.

 

LESSONS LEARNED

1. Planning helped…going and scouting the gym before I shot it was crucial. I ended up knowing exactly what I wanted to do when I got there and was very prepared.

2. Let everyone know you are using strobes…The refs were OK with it once they spoke to the coaches, but if I was able to talk to them before them game, I could have avoided getting shut down for part of the 1st quarter.

3. Shooting Single Shots is Difficult…It’s a different kind of shooting as compared to ambient light where you can fire off 5-6 shots per second. If I get to do this again, I’ll focus on a single player, concentrating on keeping them in focus. Also, timing is crucial. Because I had shot so much basketball before this, my timing wasn’t awful, but it could have been better.

4. Guilt of using a strobe…something I need to get over. I spoke with one of the JV players before the varsity game and he said he was aware of the strobes, but they only bothered him when he was shooting before the game (I didn’t shoot any shots when players were in the act of shooting during the game). On layups, I would try to focus on the player and as soon as he let go of the ball, I would fire.

5. Strobing is useful…especially in a gym like this where I don’t think I would have been able to get any kind of good exposure without them. If I can get a way without using them, I’ll do it, but at least now, I know I can use them to cover shots in dark gyms.