Subtitles of the Movie

People are always asking me, "What should I set my camera at in order to capture basketball?" Well, I do it a little different than most people. Most people set their sensitivity at about 800 to 1600 and their shutter speed at between say 400 and 600, and that seems to give reasonably decent results except in the fastest of action situations. But what I do, and I'm a little different from most people, but I think that you can see that what I do yields very, very good results. I mean I've got perfectly frozen action. As I run my ISO as high as I can possibly get it, and in my particular camera right now at this point in time, a 1D Mark 2 by Canon, the highest ISO that I can set on that is 3200. My shutter speed runs between 1000 and 1250, and of course, my aperture is set at 2.8. Most people as I mentioned, everybody's at aperture 2.8. That's a standard. That's a starting point for indoor shooting in basketball and then a lot of people, like I said before, go to 800 on their ISO and down as far as 400 or 500 on their shutter. I've tried that and it just doesn't yield the kind of results that I want out of my basketball photography. Now let's take a look at some other, now high school basketball is an even worse situation. Now, these shots were taken at Selland Arena, which does not have as good lighting as the St. Mark Center in Fresno, or most NCAA division 1 basketball arenas, but it is better than most high school arenas. If you're going to shoot basketball in high school arenas you'd better have one of the better DSLR cameras that can take your ISO up to 6400 or even 12,000 in order to capture the light because the lighting in high school arenas is absolutely abysmal. I mean, I'm a basketball official and I can tell you that some of those gyms are so dark that I can't even see the plays to make the calls much less take pictures, so just be aware. If you've got a son or a child, son or a daughter playing basketball and you want to go shoot the game, forget it on a point and shoot. It ain't gonna happen. And if you've got a mid-range DSLR, again, it ain't gonna happen. The only way you're going to do it is with one of the very, very expensive, 4000 dollar DSLR, especially the Nikons are very, very good at low-light photography. Getting your ISO to 6400 or 12,000 is the only way it's going to happen. But we can take a look at some of these shots and you know, these were done in relatively low light, but the settings for these are somewhere in the neighborhood of, again, 3200 on the ISO Ð I had to use 3200 Ð the shutter speed had to come down to between 640 and 800. That was the only way I was going to get this thing exposed. You just pays your money and you takes your chances on high school basketball. The action is not quite as fast in high school basketball, especially with the girls game as it is with NCAA, so there is something of a little bit of compensation when you start shooting high school sports, but again, it isn't that much different and indeed you are going to have to kind of play off between exposing correctly and freezing the action. So, these were done at that setting. Now, let's take a look at another sport and this is going to be Rodeo and Rodeo is different. Now these are night shots and again, 3200 ISO and an aperture of 2.8, and the reason that these are in black and white, to be quite dead honest with you, is because the color was so horrendous, the White Balance was impossible to get, and I had to boost the exposure in Photoshop so much that the Noise became overpowering. It just wasn't going to work in color, so these had to be converted to black and white. So, I was shooting at 3200 ISO, shutter speed of about, oh, I'm going to guess somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 to 800, and of course and aperture of 2.8 and they were still just vastly underexposed. Now obviously, the day shots were different, but those night shots in this Rodeo sequence were absolutely ridiculous and that's why all of these are in black and white. I didn't want some of them to be in color and some of them to be black and white. I just took all of the Rodeos and, and turned them into black and white, so there's Rodeo. Now we can take a look at one more sport and this is the NFL, and obviously these game were played in the daytime, which gives you so much more latitude. ISO of 400, which is much, much less; shutter speed of 1250, and of course an aperture of 2.8 and these are beautiful shots in terms of exposure and lack of Noise and so on. This was a game that was played in Oakland against the Raiders and the Rams. Of course the Raiders lost. This was one of the years when they were winning two, three games a year, so. The NFL gives you a little bit better shooting conditions, and also day games for NCAA Division 1 football, so football's a little bit easier in terms of exposure and freezing the action, because you've got just enough light to get everything done that you need to. So, it varies from sport to sport, as to what your settings are going to be. The basic idea is do whatever you need to do in order to freeze that action, even if you have to underexpose. You can throw them in Photoshop and correct it later, but do whatever you need to do to expose as brightly as you can and freeze the action.