Shooting a B-Ball game tonight...

[JonK]

on my 300D, I don't have a big CF card yet so I am contemplating shooting the game in JPG, or just being selective with RAW. I prefer RAW. I have a 512MB card, so, it's not the greatest. I am going to be using my 70-200mm F4.0L USM, the gym is decently lit, I did a comparable meter test in my room and i can probably pull 1/160 @ F4.0 on ISO 800. So question is, should I WB the phosphor HID lights and hope for the best, or should I shoot RAW and not worry about it, but be more selective with shots? Argh, I need to get a 2GB card or a lapt.... wait... I could also bring my laptop and just dump. Hrmmmm.

[OviV]

Why not do a custom white balance at the gym? Take a sheet of white paper, shoot it at the gym and set it as your CWB. That should get you damned close.

[gramps]

here is a link to some bball shot I did the other night. They were done with my 20 D, 24 - 70, shot at f2.8 1/500th and ISO of 1600. I was worried about CF card space so I shot in small jpg fine. I did about 350 shots and had about 1/2 of my 1 gig card left.
http://www.pbase.com/sjh/basketball

[DaveG]

on my 300D, I don't have a big CF card yet so I am contemplating shooting the game in JPG, or just being selective with RAW. I prefer RAW. I have a 512MB card, so, it's not the greatest. I am going to be using my 70-200mm F4.0L USM, the gym is decently lit, I did a comparable meter test in my room and i can probably pull 1/160 @ F4.0 on ISO 800. So question is, should I WB the phosphor HID lights and hope for the best, or should I shoot RAW and not worry about it, but be more selective with shots? Argh, I need to get a 2GB card or a lapt.... wait... I could also bring my laptop and just dump. Hrmmmm.


You've got to get your shutterspeed up to 1/500 of a second. I wouldn't shoot basketball any lower.

A custom white balance is probably a good idea since most high school gyms are a thrill-a-minute of different white balanced flourescent tubes. They may well have started off the same but as they burned out, one by one over the years,they were replaced with whatever was on hand.

[rg-tom]

the auto whitebalance and some photoshopping should be ok, I find auto better than manual on my 20D (i really cant get a decent manual white balance! even tried an expodisc, cofee filters and just plain old white paper, all give me a horrible yellow tinge).

You got any faster glass? Given the choice between a 70-200 F4 and a 50mm F1.8 I'd choose the 50mm anyday.

[Akreager]

Not to be a but head but if you have a digital body, a $700 lense (with tripod mount), and a laptop you can afford to buy a 1 gig card. They are $100 now!!!

[Jon]

JPEG and Custom White Balance. You'll need as high an ISO as you can get. But most gyms use gas-discharge type lighting, and colour balancing for that's the pits even when they aren't mixing light types. If they've got a mix of mercury and sodium types, abandon hope for a reasonable colour balancing either live or in post-processing and knock everything back to B&W unless you're shooting RAW and are ready to adjust every shot individually. If you're not experienced in this, you will be by the time you finish. But RAW will give you about 80 shots per half (assuming you bring your laptop and dump during half-time) on your card. JPEG should bring in about twice that at ISO 1600 (or, with the hack, 3200). Without a second card (of any size) any other unloading strategy will cost you some shooting time. If you do take the laptop to download during the game, and you have the hacked firmware, disable "take pictures without card".

[intechpcx]

Not to be a but head but if you have a digital body, a $700 lense (with tripod mount), and a laptop you can afford to buy a 1 gig card. They are $100 now!!!

Here you go, $66 for a 1GB card with free shipping. I've purchased from these guys before, and they were very quick.

http://www.chiefvalue.com/app/productdetails.asp?submit=&item=20-228-031&ATT=Flash%20Card%20Memory&CMP=OTC-pr1c3watch

[Jon]

Here you go, $66 for a 1GB card with free shipping. I've purchased from these guys before, and they were very quick.

http://www.chiefvalue.com/app/productdetails.asp?submit=&item=20-228-031&ATT=Flash%20Card%20Memory&CMP=OTC-pr1c3watch

I don't think off-brand memory's a bargain. A bad card will lose a lot of irreplacable pictures. And though a DR for sports can't make use of the maximum performance of a faster card, it'll benefit more from the performance boost than faster cameras do, because of the limited buffer available and that slow performance. Looking at the performance numbers on Rob Galbraith's CF database, the DR would take about 4 sec. to write a single photo (JPEG High, ISO 800-1600) to a low-end card; It'll take about half that with a high-end one. With a buffer of 4 frames, which will fill in 2.5 sec. at "continuous", which would you rather be using for action shooting? The one you can empty in 15 sec. or the one that you can empty in 7 sec.?