09 Feb Shooting basketball on a budget
I love basketball!
Eversince I was a child and I used to set my alarm clock at two o’clock or 3 o’clock in the night so I can get up and watch NBA games only to leave at 7 to school, after a long, white night, the game always stood with me.
So you can imagine the joy I had when the first sport event that I photographed was a basketball game.
I never took anything but landscape or travel pictures so what was I going to do?
My gear is kind of old and many would say limited.
How would it fare if I took it out and try to photograph an indoor event with not so great lightning and to top it off many athletes moving fast?
First let me tell you a bit about the setting.
I was invited by CSO Voluntari, a Romanian professional basketball team to attend a mini tournament, official games as part of the Romanian National Basketball League.
So this was not going to be simple due to the fact that I was photographing real athletes, real games, teams that want and fight for the championship.
My gear has always been simple.
A Fuji X-T1, a Fuji X-T20, an 18-55 kit lens and a cheap XC 50-230.
So yes, I was kind of screwed.
With no money for the powerhouse that is the 50-140 lens I had to improvise.
And that I did.
I took my old X-T1 and coupled it with the XC 50-230 for static pictures. Players during time outs, coaches on the bench, free throws, this kind of thing.
But I was still missing a good, fast lens.
And salvation came when I got the idea of browsing a local Fuji group and asked for a 50mm f2.
I was going initially for the 90 but well, that was out of my budget too so I had to search for the 50 and my luck was that I found a second hand one and got it shipped over night and I was ready to take pictures.
First things first, let me start with the camera settings.
Indoor sports mean bad lightning. Even professional venues suffer from this so I had my X-T20 iso raised to 3200 and I left it there.
Second, I took my “new” 50f2 lens and had it locked between f2 and f2.5. I never went to 2.8 since I was afraid(I guess a lack of experience made me do this since it was my first time photographing sport)
I left my shutter to 1/800 but upon reviewing some images I found some blur in a few of them so I decided to raise it to 1/1000 and leave it there.
Nobody would expect the X-T20 to be a real sports camera so I needed to try and simulate “professional” settings as much as I could so this is how I set up my camera for the games.
Left dial was set and locked to CH. CL was simply too slow and I was missing things so I fired a few rounds during practice and let it on CH.
I switched the focus mode to zone and alternated between the first and the second sizes in focus(3 by 3 and 5 by 5 if I remember correctly).
I chose option 2 from the AFC(of course I forgot to tell you that I switched the little dial on the front of the camera to C) menu.
I really had no experience here but I searched on the internet, saw what others were taking pictures of and decided to go with it.
Inside photometry I had changed the mode to center weighted and I truly believe this is how you shoot sports.
I had fiddled around and removed the AF illuminator from the camera. I didn’t want to risk upsetting a player in motion and also I had set my shutter to a near quiet volume.
My thinking/strategy was simple.
I had 2 primes. A 35f2 and a 50f2 so I wasn’t going to have the same reach as the guys carrying 70-200 zoom lenses had.
So I came up early and attended practice.
I let my 50 on and started tracking players. See how they move, see how they run, see how further away from me I was comfortable taking pictures.
I established a zone in which I decided that even if I had to crop the pictures after I would still get a decent shot.
I won’t lie to you.
Owning just a 50 is tough.
I was near the TV camera, the medical staff and a quarter of my shots were of the referees back.
All of these problems would have dissapeared by using a zoom but I had none.
So what I did was constantly moving behind the referees back trying to get a better angle.
Also, since I was limited in reach, there was no need for me to go in the stands and take pictures from above.
I was stuck on the back line and my only option was to chose which side of the board to sit on according to the available light in the gym.
Nonetheless I had an amazing time and considering that this was my first time shooting sports I was satisfied with the results I got.
As a matter of fact I am currently saving to buy an used 90f2 to help me. Get a bit more reach in the gym and maybe get even better pictures in the future.
Before shooting these games I read on the internet that the X-T2 is kind of washed up, that well, you couldn’t really use it for professional sports photography because its autofocus is slow.
You can imagine how my hopes were if all I had was the X-T20 not even the X-T2.
But, as you can see from the pictures attached, the results are really not that bad.
One thing I noticed is that it is very important for the camera to catch perfect focus on the first picture.
Otherwise, you will be left with a blurry mess for 8,10, 14 pics and that is a big no no.
Being a rookie at this I managed to screw a few beautiful phases by missing focus and I am kind of upset because I missed a couple of slam dunks.
However, upon reaching my PC, I noticed that I have enough keepers so overall I am really satisfied with how things went.
Now, you might know, from my previous articles that I am not a huge fan of editing and most of the times I use jpegs on my Instagram account or on the pictures I attached to my articles here.
However, for this special event I had all my jpegs edited from the raf files.
I was surprised to see how little editing I would have to do and bellow you can find my process.
For all the pictures in this article I used Irident Explorer and LR.
Yes , I know Capture One is better(or this is what people say) but my license expired in December and after two full years I wasn’t that keen on renewing it.
I first selected the files I wanted to edit and then I ran them through Irident, obtaining some huge DNG files which I imported into LR.
On every picture I took I did 2 basic things.
Level the picture and crop it until I was happy with the result.
For 90% of the pictures I went with a Provia simulation and chose my wb over the auto setting.
I found that this way the final result looked closest to what my eyes saw in the sports arena.
Next came exposure.
From all the pictures I have attached today I think +0.45 was the biggest value I have added, most of the files being between +0.20 and +0.40.
I messed a bit about with the blacks and the whites and used values between – 10 for the whites to +10 for the blacks.
My next step was sharpening and I tried not to overdo it by selecting very small values for sharpening and for masking.
Finally was noise removal, which was like a huge worry for me but in the end proved to be pretty simple.
I noticed that for 3200 iso I needed about 35 to 40 as values and the pictures looks really well after it.
All in all, I think that I spent about three minutes per each photo(maybe a bit more when my PC was moving too slow due to its age).
Now that I have taken this step would I change anything?
Well, to be honest, I would love trying the X-T3 and the 90f2 but unfortunately, they are out of my price range for the moment.
I am more than happy with how my little camera held up and considering the fact that this was my first shoot I have reason to believe I can get better and grab more shots before updating the body to a newer, faster one.
One thing that I would love is the 90f2.
I think it would really help me get closer to the action and offer me a chance to track action more, covering a bigger size of the arena.
However, until I can afford such moves, I will keep using my little toy camera with its little 50f2 lens glued to it.
This article was posted on the 8th of February 2021 on FujiXPassion