basketball advice?

ok, so tonight I'm going to be shooting basketball for the first time at my college. Having never shot basketball before, I figured id ask if anyone had any advice, thanks in advance!

Settings for your 7D HERE

Use Center point focus, or which ever point will be on the players body depending on how you are shooting.

Set ss to 1/640 or 1/800 if you have the room. Normal high ISO settings apply.

Shoot tight, crop tighter. Shoot mostly with your 70-200.

Don't go below 1/500 shutter speed. Noise is more acceptable than motion blur in sports photography.

Sam6644 wrote in post #13902927
Shoot tight, crop tighter. Shoot mostly with your 70-200.

Don't go below 1/500 shutter speed. Noise is more acceptable than motion blur in sports photography.

In a nutshell, this.

Sam6644 wrote in post #13902927
Shoot tight, crop tighter. Shoot mostly with your 70-200.

Don't go below 1/500 shutter speed. Noise is more acceptable than motion blur in sports photography.

^^^what he said. First thing I learned with my football games - I found motion blur acceptable (even liked it when I panned well), but was told none of those shots were acceptable. 1/500 almost always is good enough. Because of that you'll want to get there early when all the lights are on and figure out what your ISO will have to be to consistently enable you to have that shutter speed.

so from what I'm hearing it should be about the same as the hockey shooting that I normally do. thanks for the advice

For the most part, I suppose. Sports shooting is probably the most conventional type of photography.

Every arena is a little bit different, but not much else changes.

Pray for good lighting. Hope the lighting is not like most high school gyms.

dwarrenr wrote in post #13902811
Settings for your 7D HERE

Use Center point focus, or which ever point will be on the players body depending on how you are shooting.

Set ss to 1/640 or 1/800 if you have the room. Normal high ISO settings apply.

Actually, some of these settings could be changed.
Most gyms are very poorly lit. If you are lucky, you can shoot at 2.8. Most of the time it is 2.0, or 1.8.

CFNIII- #5 After much trial and error, my 85 mm 1.8 is out of focus. I had to set this to a +3 to get the focusing correct.

CFNIII- #12 is best to set to 1. This way you can aim to focus on the face since you will most likely be using low number apertures (2.8 or less), with less depth of field. If your doing an outdoor sport with great lighting, and Using a higher # aperture, I wouldn't change this value. But dropping to a low number aperture, you lose depth of field. The most important focus point is the face, not the middle of the body.

ok so heres a few quick ones from the game. CC is more than welcome.

1.

What were your settings for the shots? What did you use for WB?

#1 - Nice exposure and framing. The better angle would have been mid court.
#2 & 3 - framing is good. Seems a bit underexposed.
#4 - framing is good. underexposed
#5 - nice action shot.

Overall pretty good stuff.