Basketball in the hall

Sports portraits (or "sportraits" if you like the lingo) are always a chance to have some fun.

In this case, we were doing a shot of a basketball player at SWCC in Terrell who hails from Sudan via Egypt and Australia.

Time is generally short for these kinds of things, so the first thing to do is get there a little early and find a unique looking place to shoot. The facilities are pretty old at the school, so everything has an older feel, which is nice. Beside the gym was this nice baby-blue tiled hallway. Perfecto. The key is to use an interesting setting without letting the setting take away from the subject.

My mobile lighting kit is straight out of the Strobist playbook.. two hotshoe flashes, stands, umbrellas, Lastolite EzyBox, reflector and some grids and snoots.

That test shot was the camera's metering at -2/3, which came up with 1/20 at f5.6, iso 200.

To underexpose the ambient further, and get my shutter up where I needed to be for a basketball player coming down the hall, I went to ISO 400 and set the shutter at 1/200.

I used a Canon 580exII in a shoot-through umbrella high and to the left of the camera, and a 430ex at the end of the hall for a test shot that looked like this..

I raised the back flash to the height of the window and had Karor dribble down the hall toward me for shot #1, which I was OK with (processed in Lightroom). The guy is 6'7" so I was standing on a chair for this..

The chair I was standing in was a retro arm chair thing, and quite short. I put him in the chair, which, with a 24mm, made him look huge for shot #2.

Karor decided to play around a bit... always a good thing to show some personality.

OK, that was a fun exercise. And that was less than 15 minutes to set up and test, then after Karor arrived, we shot for less than five minutes.

The first test shot shows 4:42 p.m., the last shot of Karor was at 4:55 p.m. (still haven't moved my cameras back an hour).

Here are a few more outtakes that I played with in Lightroom...

Light test revisited..


Non-firing flash creates silhouette, and shows what light the back flash was providing to the scene...


Wider-angle version of pointing shot..


Have a great week...
Don J.