Ref Butts and Slam Dunks: What It's Like Photographing an NBA Game

Related interesting fact (which I learned the hard way). Indoor volleyball is one of the hardest sports to photograph well. It shares many of the same technical challenges as indoor basketball but a hitter's swing and subsequent ball speed are much faster.

As a fairly serious amateur photographer possessing the usual higher-end DSLRs and a backpack full of lenses, when our teen daughter showed interest and aptitude in competitive club volleyball, my wife asked "Hey, with all that gear can you get some dramatic shots of her playing?" "Sure!" I naively responded. I started to realize just how wrong I was when I tried to shoot the first game and largely failed to get shots that were A) at the right moment, B) not motion blurred, and C) in focus.

I was shocked. Only once I'd failed did I bother to look up "Shooting Indoor Volleyball" and discover posts from Olympic-level pro sports photographers commiserating about the unique challenges of indoor V-ball. There are two sets of interrelated problems that compound each other: technical and practical. The main technical problem is that a lot of indoor volleyball courts aren't very well lit. Sure, they seem bright enough to the naked eye but freezing high-speed motion needs a lot of light to enable a fast shutter speed. And you need a long lens (ie a lot of zoom) because you can't be right alongside the court due to line judges needing clear sight lines and the ever-present risk of players chasing an errant ball trampling you. Lenses that do all of that at high-quality and auto-focus quickly are big, heavy and very expensive. If indoor volleyball was outdoors, even on a cloudy day, there would be double the light and this would all be much easier.

The second set of problems are practical. There a 12 players on the court, six on a side in two rows of three. As you try to line up shots where the action is likely to happen you quickly discover that this configuration has players constantly moving in front of the shot zone you were aiming for. And this is where auto-focus becomes a real challenge as it will constantly be refocusing on the players moving into your frame in front of or behind the 'shot zone', which is empty because the hitter is winding up and still flying toward the net and shot zone where the hit will happen. Of course, you can also take the approach of picking a player and having the auto-focus stick to that player, except the whole goal of the ball setter and potential hitters is to hide which player is actually going to hit the ball as long as possible. Oh, and there's a grid of sharp black lines called "the net" just 20-inches away from your shot zone desperately trying to get your auto-focus to focus on it instead of the ball or hitter (neither of which are there yet).

I did ultimately manage to get some good shots. My wife and daughter were pleased. I only managed to do this by shooting literally thousands of shots and spending hours reviewing shots to find the few keepers. Having a camera capable of shooting over 20 50 megapixel shots a second helps. I spent a fair bit of that time wishing my daughter had taken a liking to softball instead... :-)

The big thing missing from the article is the strobes.

Flash is how pros get their pictures and there is a network of massive strobes that the photographic pool share. Same is true for most basketball arenas in the US.

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