patrickwilson86 wrote:
Get on the baseline if you can. You don't want to be directly under the basket, but off to one side a bit, depending on whether the majority of your shooters are left-handed or right-handed. Watch them do their lay-ups during warm-ups, and pick the side that you can get the most kids on. If you can move along the baseline, even better.
This is absolutely right. I used to do sports photography for a small newspaper back in the mid '90s. I did it with completely inadequate equipment -- Nikon N6006 film SLR, Tri-X 400 film from a bulk-loader, usually pushed a stop to 800 ... the camera was my own. The paper had cameras, but they were all manual focus and I couldn't make that work for sports to save my life. I had two crappy Quantaray zooms, one a 35-80 and the other a 70-210, and of course both of the were slow lenses. I liked the angle of view from the 35-80 at 80mm, but it was slower at that point than the 70-210, and for that a couple other small reasons I just shot the latter lens for basketball from the location described above. I should add that back then my equipment would not have worked at all for this had I not also added a big honkin' Sunpak flash on a bracket. Some people today worry about this distracting players, but it never seemed to bother any of them. I never got any complaints and the coaches all assured me it was okay. If I was shooting just one local team I'd switch sides at the half so that I could always get "my" team on offense. I also learned that referees had their habits and you might have to adjust your position based on where they tended to stand.
I learned that basketball is the easiest sport to shoot in terms of photographic opportunities. If you choose your spot based on the advice above, the action comes to you almost all the time. You do
not need to roam up and down the perimeter of the court unless you're really bored getting action shots under the basket. That may not be where
all the good shot opportunities are, but it is likely where you'll find most of them. Pick your position, adjust as needed in the early going, and just sit on the floor a couple of feet behind the end line, use continuous autofocus and follow the ball once it gets about halfway past the half-court line coming in your direction. Another thing that really helps is to follow a team or small number of teams as much as possible. Shoot them as often as you can and watch them play. You'll begin to be able to anticipate what they might do next, and you'll have a greater chance of being ready. This works best for teams that are pretty good and play their game against most any opponent. Other teams may be from smaller schools but be well-coached -- those teams tend to adjust and adapt to their opponent, so their style is more fluid. Even the mediocre teams -- especially the pretty good and pretty scrappy teams -- usually have one or two players who stand out. They'll often get the ball more than the others and may provide the most dynamic photo ops. If you're following the ball, you'll get them by default anyway.
Will you take a hit being so close to the action? Maybe, but not very often in my experience. My camera took a deflected shot right to the front once. Knocked AF out of whack. Solution was to turn off the camera, unmount and re-mount the lens. That fixed it. I took a couple of minor hits myself -- brushes, really. Nothing painful.
I really question the need to go out and spend a lot of money on a high-end telephoto lens for this, especially if you can get the vantage point described above. Not that such lenses wouldn't be useful, but (especially if price is an issue), I'd recommend the 50mm f/1.8 lens that works with your camera. Shouldn't cost more than $100-$150, I'd think. Presuming your camera has a crop-sensor, that puts it at about 75-80mm equivalent. Again, shooting from the described position when the action is within the free-throw line, you'll get a nice, fairly tight but still versatile action view with whole-body shots. Shooting vertically -- which I'd recommend, you'll have room for a ball-handler and a defender or two in the shot. It won't work for close-ups of faces, but honestly you'd need experience to make that work and I, frankly, don't usually find shots
that tight to be the most compelling, unless they're really unusual.
Here's the only shot I still have from those days -- it was my favorite of all the ones I shot in that job. It was, as I say, shot with flash (I blurred the background a bit in Photoshop years later), but this approximates the angle of view you'd get from a 50mm lens from this position:
http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1297/1183816870_fc4dfe8373.jpg
Vernon Basketball, circa 1995 by Experiment SixTwoSix, on Flickr
SSB
quote=patrickwilson86 Get on the baseline if you ... (