Women's Club Basketball (College) Tournament

Doesn't seem like time for basketball already, but my daughter's team played in a club tournament at UNC yesterday. These pictures are from their games against Duke and UNC, which they got clobbered pretty badly in both games. She said that two of their best defensive players weren't able to be there, but I'm not sure it would have mattered. Hopefully the pictures I took will make them feel better.

I shot with the 1D Mark III the whole time, but mixed it up on lenses. The Carolina game was with the 85 f/1.8 (and I also used the 200 f/1.8 but didn't post any pictures from it) and ISO2000. The Duke game I used the 70-200 IS f/2.8 and shot at ISO6400. I like the flexibility of the zoom and the bigger depth of field, but the image quality is definitely better from the faster primes. Everything was processed solely in Lightroom V2.... and no noise reduction was applied... not even in Lightroom (I actually forgot to do it!).

1.

Pretty nice snaps, especially with that bright, white wall behind them. Number six is noisy and seven is a bit as well but overall nice action shots, especially number five.

How do you like shooting with the 85 1.8? My son just picked one up so naturally I'm going to have to test it for him (if he wants to keep living in my house) and I'm anxious to see how it does shooting bball.

Anderson-Photography wrote in post #6450488
Pretty nice snaps, especially with that bright, white wall behind them. Number six is noisy and seven is a bit as well but overall nice action shots, especially number five.

How do you like shooting with the 85 1.8? My son just picked one up so naturally I'm going to have to test it for him (if he wants to keep living in my house) and I'm anxious to see how it does shooting bball.

As I mentioned up top... number 6 and 7 are ISO6400... the rest are ISO2000. When I was going through them in Lightroom, I forgot to deal with the noise. I was going to wait and do it on all of them at the same time, but forgot about it. So this gives you an idea what uncorrected noise looks like from the Mark III at ISO6400.

The 85 1.8 is a great basketball lens with the 1.3 crop bodies. Its probably a little too long for a 1.6 body, and a 50mm would probably do better. But the 85 focusses a lot faster than the 50 1.8 a. You certainly can't go wrong with the 85 for indoor sports in general though... its not too expensive and pretty sharp. I shoot it usually at f/2 which is what I believe 1-5 are here.

Number 5... yeh... got a bunch like that. You'd think that would be a foul, but the refs weren't calling much of anything. My daughter is number 30 there and she got beat up pretty good at this thing. She actually got knocked out of bounds while dribbling the ball up the sideline and got no foul called. She's a pretty tough girl and doesn't back down from anyone in a game, so for them to knock her out of bounds is doing a lot.

Not to expenseve? I want one!! These are great and at ISO6400 that is awesome. I would love to see the end pp results with the noise reduction. Which one are you using to correct the noise? You did a great job with these shots. Nice action!!

DonE wrote in post #6452093
Not to expenseve? I want one!! These are great and at ISO6400 that is awesome. I would love to see the end pp results with the noise reduction. Which one are you using to correct the noise? You did a great job with these shots. Nice action!!

"Not too expensive" was in reference to other fast lenses. The 85 f/1.8 is a very good lens, yet a lot less expensive than the L prime lenses.

I will probably not do any more processing on the images until when I get orders for any. I took about 1500 pictures and cut it down to abut 400 that were good, not duplicates, etc. Of those, about 1/3 were at ISO6400 and I don't think they look too bad at this size... certainly even look better in my gallery since they are a little smaller even. I would probably just do it in Lightroom V2.

So lightroom V2 has a good noise reduction program? I was kidding about the 85mm. I've seen and heard nothing but good things from that lens.

Lightroom V2 has better noise reduction than Lightroom V1, but its not as good as something like Noise Ninja. I hope that one day we have a plug-in for that. That said, a combination of LR's noise reduction, together with altering the blacks, exposure, contrast, etc. can usually mitigate a good part of the noise. Most of my sales are smaller print sizes. With LR V2, I've gotten pretty lazy about going into PS anymore. I actually haven't used PS for image work since LR V2 went on my machine.

I do a lot of weddings. Maybe I need to look more into this if it helps reduce the work load. I spend a lot of time editing. Also Lightroom allows you do shoot and download RAW files as well, does it not? I have CS2 and do not shoot in RAW for several reasons. Not to take away from your post, but you seem to know more about this Lightroom stuff than I've heard.

DonE wrote in post #6452614
I do a lot of weddings. Maybe I need to look more into this if it helps reduce the work load. I spend a lot of time editing. Also Lightroom allows you do shoot and download RAW files as well, does it not? I have CS2 and do not shoot in RAW for several reasons. Not to take away from your post, but you seem to know more about this Lightroom stuff than I've heard.

Hey... I've up for a thread going off topic...

Lightroom keeps your original images in whatever form you want to keep them, and never touches them. All your edits, even if you have multiple versions of the same image (B&W, tighter crop, etc.) are just stored in data. Then depending on your needed output... print, web, crops, etc... it produces the output files you need when you need them... no need to save those.

I don't do weddings, but I am a big fan of Ed Pierce and his training DVDs. I was at his seminar earlier this year in NC and picked up his Lightroom Simplified DVD. In the training, he walks you through a Wedding workflow and then a Portrait workflow... using Lightroom. He demonstrates how he goes through the whole process, how he makes adjustments, how he sits down with the client and what he shows them, etc. It is very good and not the "what ever function is in the product" type of training which is available all over the place.

Sweet, I need to really check into this. Thanks for all the great info.

No problem. The more I use Lightroom, the quicker my workflow becomes. I'm actually considering spending about $600 for a custom keyboard and Lightroom add-on that would speed things even faster. That is RPG-Keys. They claim they can fully process a wedding with 2000 photos in 3 hours. Assuming the photographer shot smartly, then I believe this. I am not up to that pace yet and without their keyboard it would be hard to achieve it... but I can definitely process things much quicker than before I used it. I used to bring everything in to Photo Mechanic first... vet the image and select what I wanted. Then I'd have to go into Photoshop and do any adjustments and cropping. Now I can do all of that in Lightroom. One of the things that saves me a lot of time is being able to adjust one image, then copy/paste the adjustment to similar images in the series. I have now gotten to the point where I have some presets that have the look I like, and so I apply that to everything on import so my starting point is a lot closer now then when I first started using it.

This is a link to the Ed Pierce DVD... http://www.photovision​video.com …RSV2030&Categor​y_Code=DVD

and RPG Keys... which I've not tried but it looks pretty impressive... http://www.rpgkeys.com​/

Wow, checking out that video. Need to look at it again. Looks like a great tool for a lot of workload. Thanks again for all this great info.