Women's bbal - Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth

[maderito]

Last home game for the Yale bulldogs this weekend. Two losses to the top 2 Ivy women's teams, Dartmouth and Harvard.

This season I've finally developed a good work flow for WB and post-processing. These were shot with the 85/1.8 lens @ f/1.8, 1/500 sec, ISO 1600 -- all "natural" light - such as it is. :confused:
1
http://www.pbase.com/maderito/image/40293015.jpg
2
http://www.pbase.com/maderito/image/40293016.jpg
3
http://www.pbase.com/maderito/image/40293014.jpg

[sGu]

Lovely colour and contrast, good actions, too! And court lighting is so much better than what we have here in UK :rolleyes:

Keep up the good work! :D

[aam1234]

Excellent photos! the WB in the 1st one is super.

[maderito]

Thanks sGU and aam1234.

I've learned a few things while trying different approaches to post-processing basketball action shot in gymnasiums. The lighting in this particular gym (an old one) is not especially good or bad - just typical. I underexposed these shots by about 1/3 stop to get the shutter speed up to 1/500 and relied on noise reduction software to handle the increased noise. Usually I shoot at f/2, 1/320 in this gym.

Some observations after two years of shooting basketball on weekends.

-White balance:
The great virtue of setting white balance accurately is that all colors tend to snap into place. Not so with gymnasium lighting. You cannot achieve neutral colors across all grey levels with one WB setting. This is true for most types of lighting, but the problem is more exaggerated with the discontinuous spectrum of mercury vapor lights. Once you set the WB, you still need to adjust color across different color ranges (via hue/saturation or selective color adjustments) to get colors right. When you are finished fine tuning color corrections on an image, you have, in effect, profiled your camera for the lighting conditions of that image (but probably not for the next image). :(

-Images that pop:
With natural lighting for basketball action, you cannot get tack sharp images because of the inherent limitations of (1) stopping action, (2) shallow DOF, and (3) high ISO. In order to enhance the perception of sharpness, you need good contrast and well saturated colors. But ... as you increase saturation and contrast, color correction problems only magnify. These color distortions become particularly noticeable in skin tones (perhaps way too yellow or magenta) and in the appearance of the gym floor (glowing yellow). That said, you need to start with a reasonably sharp, in focus shot or everything will look unnatural.

I batch a PS action to handle these post-processing problems fairly efficiently.