How to take good basketball pictures in a gym

How to Get Pro-Quality Sports Photos in a School Gym

High school gymnasiums can offer a multitude of photographic opportunities – basketball games, crowd shots, and other school events. But they can also have the most abysmal lighting conditions around.  Just how do you get a clear photograph in a dark, often mixed lighting environment?  With a little bit of know-how and preparation you can!

If you'll be photographing volleyball, basketball, wrestling, gymnastics, or other indoor sports, these tips will hopefully help you to get a clear image.

The real problem with shooting in an indoor gym is that the area is usually not well lit.  Normally this could be counteracted with a slower shutter speed to gather light, but that would produce a blurry image since the players are moving quickly.  Shooting indoor sports is actually one of the most challenging photography situations there is. This creates an opportunity to test your skills!

Recommended Camera Settings for Shooting in a School Gym

Usually, getting the exposure settings for a particular situation is easy, but photographing fast moving sports action in a dim environment is quite challenging.  Here is a good starting point for setting your camera settings for shooting in a school gym:

• Use the largest aperture (lowest f-stop number) available on your lens.  Ideally, you'll have a lens with a max aperture of f/2.8 or f/4.  Slower lenses that can only open up to f/5.6 will likely not gather enough light to have a successful shoot in a gym for photographing sports.
• Set your shutter speed to 1/500 or faster to freeze the action.  Ideally, we'd shoot at 1/1000 but unless you have a very fast lens, this often isn't feasible.  You may find yourself at 1/500 or 1/640 which will show some motion blur on hands or feet when the players are moving around, but otherwise the image is too dark.
• Set your ISO to 1600 or faster.  You'll likely find that most setups will require ISO 3200 to properly expose the image.  This will produce some noise in the picture, but some noise in unavoidable in indoor sports photography unless the gym is extremely well lit (rare).
• Set your focus to continuous so you can track the action of the players.  This will be written “AF-C” on Nikon cameras or “AI Servo” on Canon cameras.

The ISO is the most important part of this equation.  I highly recommend reading my article on setting the ISO for any situation if you haven't yet.

None of these settings are ideal.  Using an ISO that high will undoubtedly produce some noise in your photo.  Shooting with a fast aperture will make focus more difficult.  Shooting at a fast shutter speed makes gathering enough light difficult.  Nothing is ideal when shooting indoor sports, but you have to learn to make compromises with your camera settings in order to get a properly exposed photo in a dimly lit gym.

More Tips for Shooting Sports Photos in a Gym

Do some scouting ahead of time. This will ease your anxiety and frustration. Take some test shots, specifically to nail your white balance. White balance means that the camera is trying to determine what the neutral color is and which color balance to apply to the photo. If you’re in a gym, you’ll see kind of a green, sickly light due to the bulbs they use. In most houses, the light is a yellowish color unless you’re using daylight balanced light bulbs in which case they will be more of a white color. The light changes everywhere you go – shade is different than the sunlight, etc. There are some presets for white balance in your camera so you can use these and it will get you pretty close to where you need to be. You can also set a custom white balance if you know you will be shooting somewhere in particular with terrible lighting like the gym.

Gymnasiums often have mixed lighting from natural windows spilling out light up high to tungsten lighting which can cause you photos to look orange. Ask if you can shoot some of your kids practices – this will be a good warm up for the main event and see exactly which camera shooting work the best.  After adjusting your settings and shooting the practice, look at the photos on your computer to see how well the pictures turned out. From there you can adjust the white balance further than the settings could in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

Once you have your white balance and positioning in place, now you can concentrate on actually taking the shot. One thing to remember is to be sure to get to the gym ahead of time so you can choose your seat. The key to taking good sports photography is anticipating the action. During the practices, learn where to position yourself so you will have an unimpeded view of the action without getting in the middle of the action!

After you have done all the prep work and are in the precise shooting position, what should your settings be? Your DSLR does offer some standard modes – you know the little icons on the dial – look for the figure running. But those settings are an approximation and generally work best outdoors where there’s plenty of light otherwise you will get motion blur. If the sports mode works for you and you are happy with the results – great. If not, manually adjusting your settings is the next option.

Sports photography is about freezing the action so you will need a fast shutter speed of at least 1/125 or 1/250 of a second or higher. Anything slower and you risk blurring the players. You will probably have to increase your ISO – look in the range of 800 to 1600. Depending on your camera, it could introduce noise into the picture so experiment with different ISOs to see how high you can go before noise creeps into your photos.

For the aperture, the kit lens that came with your DSLR may work just fine outdoors but indoors that 18-200mm f4.5/5.6 may not open up enough. You may have to open up your aperture to f/2.8 which should give you decent depth of field. But that also means you might have to purchase or rent a lens that is capable of handling low light situations. Unfortunately, because it’s a sporting event, you probably won’t be able to use your speedlight or built-in flash. There will be too much concern that your flash will temporarily blind a player and interrupt or alter the play. Check with school officials to see what their policy is on flash photography.

Sadly, there is not an easy solution to ugly gymnasium photos, but these tricks will at least get you better photos. With time, you will learn more of what works and what doesn't. Luckily, we can adjust quite a bit while post processing.

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How to Aim for Better Basketball Photography (10 Hot Tips)

Basketball photography is an exciting and dynamic sport to shoot. But it can also be challenging due to the need to freeze motion.

If you’ve been wanting to take razor-sharp action photos like those that you see in the sports section of the newspaper, read on.

Here are ten tips to help you focus your camera and get sharp basketball photos.

10.

To freeze action, your minimum shutter speed should be 1/500th of a second. Go even higher if the lighting situation and particular combination of your camera and lens allow for it.

Manual Mode is usually the best mode for professional-looking and properly exposed shots. But it’s not always the best choice for every situation.

When it comes to shooting sports, try setting your camera to Shutter Priority Mode instead of Manual Mode. This will ensure that your camera stays at the minimum shutter speed while it calculates the right F-stop and ISO required to properly expose your photos.

It will also prevent you from having to worry about your settings.

Take a few shots and check them for any unwanted blurring. If they are not sharp enough, go higher with your shutter speed, say to 1/1000th of a second.

9. Increase Your ISO

The way to get more light into your camera when shooting a basketball game is to increase your ISO.

Ordinarily, playing with the shutter speed is the best way to increase the amount of light hitting your sensor. Increasing ISO can introduce grain, or “noise” into the image.

In sports photography, this is not the best option. The shutter speed must be high to get sharp images.

If you don’t have enough light coming into your camera, you have no choice but to increase your ISO.

You can fix noise in post-production. Lightroom has a good option for repairing noise.

You can also use a dedicated noise repair plug-in with either Lightroom or Photoshop, such as DFine from the Nik Collection.

This selectively repairs the noise in an image and is tailored to whichever camera you’re using.

8. Shoot at a Wide Aperture

To shoot at a high shutter speed, you’ll need to use a wide aperture, ideally from F/2.8 to F/4,

This will allow more light into your camera.

The lens you’re using will determine how wide you set your aperture. A good quality lens with a maximum aperture of f/2. 8 or f/4 will give you the best results.

In all likelihood, you’ll also be using a zoom lens. If you crop in as close as possible, your lens will not let as much light in. This is where the aperture is the narrowest. In this case, shoot wider and crop in post.

One bonus of shooting at a wide aperture is that it can give you blurred out background. This can look great in basketball photography. It can give the image a sense of urgency and speed.

It can also help isolate the player acting as the main subject in the composition. It will draw the viewer’s eye to the most important part of the image.

7. Shoot In JPEG

It may surprise you to hear me say that you should consider shooting your sports photography in JPEG format. After all, you are repeatedly told that for professional-looking photos, you should always shoot in Raw.

This may be true for several genres in photography. When photographing sports, capturing the action of the game is more important than having really high-quality photos that can withstand a lot of post-processing.

Shooting in JPEG will allow you to shoot more images in burst mode. You’ll also be able to fit more images on your memory card.

You can miss a crucial part in the game in the few minutes it can take you to swap out memory cards. The less often you need to change them out, the better.

6. Use Autofocus

When photographing a basketball game or any other sport, it makes sense to choose autofocus over manual focus. You just don’t have the time to be fiddling with your lens that way.

Not to mention that you need to have excellent eyesight. Being just a millimeter off can mean that you miss focus and lose those killer shots.

For your camera’s autofocus system to function properly, there needs to be contrast in the area where you want to focus.

This can be a problem in the low light situations that are common indoors.

When there is not much contrast, the camera doesn’t know where to focus. If there is not enough light hitting the sensor, the lens motor will keep moving. It’ll hunt for focus without locking onto the subject.

This can cause you to lose precious seconds when you need to be getting crucial shots. Be sure to focus on an area of contrast within your subject.

5. Use Multiple AF Points

The accuracy of the autofocus system is in part influenced by the number of autofocus points your camera has.

It can be hard to nail focus if you have only nine AF point on your camera. One of the biggest differences between cameras and their price points is the number of points the AF system offers.

The costly, more professional systems always have a lot of AF points. Some of the new mirrorless cameras even have focus points in every part of the screen.

Use multiple AF points to take control of your camera’s autofocus system and take sharper images.

4. Set Your Camera to Continuous AF

Continuous Autofocus is when the AF system focuses continuously on the area covered by selected autofocus points.

Most cameras have four focusing modes: manual, auto, single, or continuous.

On a Canon, continuous focus in called AF or Al Servo. On Nikon or Sony, it’s AF-C.

In this mode, as soon as the autofocus system detects a moving subject it activates predictive tracking. It continuously monitors the focus distance. And it adjusts the focus when the distance from the camera to subject changes.

The autofocus system will adjust the point of focus. If you want to focus on a subject that is not covered by any of the AF points, you’ll need to lock the focus distance by pressing the AF lock button.

3. Use Burst Mode

Set your camera to Burst Mode. This will allow you to shoot several frames with one press of the shutter. This will increase your chances of getting a perfectly composed action shot. Note that it will also fill up your memory card more quickly.

Be sure to bring extra memory cards with a high storage capacity. This means that you won’t have to lose precious minutes in the game by having to repeatedly swap them out.

Your best bet is to use Burst Mode for crucial parts of the game. Revert to single shooting most of the time.

2. Switch to Back Button Focus

Back Button Focus is a boon to every type of photographer, even the portrait shooter.

Back Button Focus is the transfer of the focusing function from the shutter button to one of the buttons on the back of your camera.

When used in basketball and other types of sports photography, back button focus will increase your shooting efficiency. You’ll be able to shoot faster.

Instead of pressing the shutter button halfway down to focus, you press a button on the back of your camera with your thumb and use a finger to press the shutter.

This makes focusing and shooting a lot quicker. You don’t have to constantly refocus. And you can keep adjusting your composition without worrying about focusing every time. Your focus will hold, even if you release the shutter button.

Together with continuous focusing, it will increase the likelihood of achieving perfect focus even with difficult shots.

Check your camera manual to figure out how to set Back Button Focus for your particular camera brand and model.

It may feel a bit awkward at first. But you will quickly get used to it. You might even end up keeping your camera on Back Button Focus all of the time.

1. How to Find the Best Vantage Points

Last but not least, think about your vantage point throughout the basketball game. Situating yourself for the biggest impact may mean moving around a lot if there is room for you to do so.

Sports photography also means getting down to the ground or contorting yourself into awkward positions to get dynamic shots.

Don’t be afraid to move with the action. Have a plan beforehand of how you’re going to move around the court for the most advantageous point of view.

One tip for shooting a basketball game outside on a sunny day, make sure that the sun is behind you. This will help get more light into the lens and assist in getting up to those fast shutter speeds with less noise.

When you’re shooting basketball photography, be sure to fill the frame with the players. Capture their facial expressions. Documenting the emotions in a game is a crucial aspect of sports photography.

Conclusion

Be sure to take a few test shots before the game starts. You can check how sharp your images are beforehand and make any necessary adjustments to your camera settings.

Basketball photography is one of the most exciting games to shoot in the realm of sports photography.

With these ten tips, you’ll be sure to get dynamic and sharp action photos the next time you shoot a basketball game.

10 rules of sports photography for beginners | Articles | Photo, video, optics

Sports photography is a hobby or a profession for the most notorious fans. Capturing the movement, dynamics and highlights of a sporting event, whether it's a football or hockey match, rugby, running or tennis, is not as easy as it might seem at first. If you've ever paid attention to football stadium photographers - their equipment can be both envious and surprising - huge lenses that require their own tripod, many accessories and continuous tracking of every movement.

But before advancing to the premier league of photographers, you need to learn and the best way is small matches and events where you can practice shooting.

We've rounded up the top 10 tips and tricks to help any photographer take their first step into sports photography, and maybe someone will be interested enough to make a career out of it. Well, let's get started!

What do you need?

In order to film sports events, of course, you need a camera. A DSLR is, of course, good, but modern mirrorless cameras are sometimes faster in continuous shooting. This, of course, comes from not having to constantly raise the mirror. Therefore, the fps value of mirrorless cameras is always higher. The main need, however, is the ability to manually set the shutter speed. Because you will need to shoot fast and get crisp, sharp shots.

When you arrive at the competition site, don't forget to ask if you can film. It's best to always stock up on resolution, and then move on to filming.

Lens must have a focal length of at least 200mm

The focal length of your lens is critical. Since you can't shoot directly in the middle of the action, right on the field, you'll need a telephoto lens. Yes, yes, that is why professional photographers have such huge lenses around the perimeter of stadiums. In this case, the more, the better. But the optimal length is exactly 200mm. You can zoom in enough, isolate the subject from the environment and, of course, if necessary, shoot anything - from a portrait to a group composition.

Best options for Nikon cameras are Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G ED AF-S VR II DX or Nikon 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR AF-S Nikkor.

For Canon cameras, the Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM or the cheaper option Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 DO IS USM will do.

Forget about the auto mode

More or less professional photographers are not usually reminded of this, but it's always worth noting that in photography the automatic mode rarely comes to the rescue, and for good reason we are offered a lot of manual settings. To understand how and what works, the first thing to do is to read the instructions for the camera. Then you will be able to deal with each indicator separately, and will not be afraid of the concepts of ISO, aperture (or aperture), white balance, etc. at all. So forget about automatic modes, even if they are named Sports or Action. We need manual mode.

Use a fast shutter speed

This is a mandatory rule that you should not forget at all. You're shooting fast paced action, so it makes perfect sense that we need a fast shutter speed to get sharpness and avoid shadows and blurry shots. Minimum 1/500 sec. will be enough to fix a moving object, if you set the shutter speed longer, all the associated risks will just appear.

Use aperture priority

First, let's look at the classic shooting modes that the average DSLR or mirrorless offers us. In addition to automatic and manual, there are modes such as shutter priority (Shutter Priority), and aperture priority (Aperture Priority).

Aperture is a value referred to as A or AV, measured in f/, or steps, which means how much light passes through the aperture directly to the matrix. If you set the settings to aperture priority, the camera will automatically set the shutter speed. This is the ideal mode for shooting on a sunny day and is used by many professional sports photographers. But what exactly needs to be done in order to properly set the aperture? We need to set a high value, that is, the figure should be vice versa, lower. For example, f/2.8 or f/4. So the maximum light will hit the matrix, and for the correct exposure, the camera will independently set a short shutter speed.

Don't forget ISO

Understandably, shutter speed and aperture are important, but the third important exposure value is ISO or ISO. When we shoot in semi-automatic modes, whether it's aperture or shutter priority, we have to set the ISO manually. To do this, we take into account the place and weather conditions, and even time. For example, ISO 400 is sufficient in daytime solar time, but if the sky is overcast, ISO should be set within 800-1200. You can learn more about this value, of course, from the instructions.

If aperture priority mode is not available, select shutter priority mode

If you are shooting not with a DSLR, but with a camera that allows you to operate only with shutter speed settings, you will have to work with this mode. Even travel cameras tend to do this, although modern cameras tend to be more capable. Let's take a look at a few details though.

Instead of telling the camera how much light to let in, we will immediately indicate what shutter speed to set - 1/500 second will be enough. But don't forget to take a few test shots to see if the value is set correctly, given the environment.

Use fast autofocus and burst mode

In order for the camera to track the fast movements of athletes, it is best to focus continuously on the subject or subjects rather than focusing on a single point. In addition, be sure to set the burst mode. How many frames per second you can shoot - will show the Burst value measured in fps (literally frame per second). The higher the fps value, the better. So if you want to start out as a hobbyist but plan to continue into sports photography, the best choice is a mirrorless camera. Mirrorless cameras, as we have already noted, allow you to shoot a large number of frames per second and DSLRs are far behind them in this regard.

Choose a good vantage point

The best vantage point is usually where the sun is behind you. Thus, the shooting area will be well lit. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a good understanding of the sport you're shooting for. This way you can predict both the action and the game, so you will know exactly where to point the lens so as not to miss an important shot. Everyone sees what is happening in the general frame of the field anyway, and your task is to get closer to the players and take those shots that cannot be seen from the stands.

Shoot as many pictures as you can

This rule is practically golden. You will of course need a large memory card and a good camera battery, but the trick is to shoot first and then choose. The very essence of the competition, whether it be a football tournament or a tennis match, lies in the dynamics and speed. So, it is these qualities that the photographer will have to adopt. The results can be viewed later, just like choosing the best shots. Shooting in RAW format, you can correct some of them in post-processing, the main thing is to have time to capture the most spectacular moments.

That's why it's not uncommon for a sports photographer to go home with over 2000 raw shots, and publish at most 50 of them.

Shoot from a low angle (knee height) and use a tripod

It gives the shot more drama, creates an additional mood, in addition, you can not only shoot a player against the grass, you can shoot a podium, sky or spotlights, which also allows you to get interesting angles. This technique is often used by professionals, and this is exactly what you need to learn from them right away.

A tripod is needed to stabilize and balance the camera when shooting from different angles and angles, especially from low altitudes. Therefore, make sure that the minimum height of the tripod is comfortable.

The Cullmann Concept One 628M OT38 tripod is convenient because its minimum working height is only 27 cm, the maximum is 189 cm. The combination of price and quality leaves no doubt that it is ideal for shooting sports events.

The Fujifilm X-T20 is a great sports camera with all the settings available and an impressive 14fps, making it the perfect companion for sports events. In addition, the camera is equipped with long focus, shoots in RAW format and 4K video shooting capabilities.

Indoor sports photography