Jaackill, not trying to depreciate anything you say, but there is another side. Some secondary school athletes love it when someone other than their parents are taking pictures. Flash makes that obvious.

In a dimly lit gym, it can be difficult to stop action without a flash. New cameras have high quantum efficiency sensors and with brighter gyms today, flash isn't often necessary. But I have had players ask me why I am not taking pictures, because my flash doesn't go off.

I don't use flash because it doesn't improve what I am able to capture enough to make it worth the effort, if it improves things at all.

It is nice that we have photographers who are respectful of their subjects.

Gyms are on the average much better lit today than 50 years ago. Even at smaller not so we'll to do private schools. In high school I shot Tri-X by the 100 foot bulk roll, and being in Rochester there were dads who would manage to get several 100 foot rolls for us to load from.

Basketball was almost always developed with Diafine and sometimes pushed further ASA 1600 and pushed to ASA 2000. Acufine was used for other indoor sports like wrestling. (ASA 1000). I probably got carried away with pushing because I even push processed with D-76, which we had in abundance being a Kodak product.

Good pointers.

On the burst...good idea if it works for you. I could never get it to do so, dating back to film autowinders. The opportunities don't have the same sequence. In something like cross country, it works great. Basketball just seems not the same rhythm.

If anyone has used burst shots with basketball, with good success, I would love to hear about it. Like what they do, and how it works. I just couldn't get it to click. Oh no, not another unintentional pun!

The D800 does as well. One of the methods is lossy. There is also a lossless compression. The lossless is said to reduce file size 20-40%. The lossy is said to provide 35 to 55% compression.

I have shot indoor basketball games for 50+ years. Recently, I shoot more handheld video from the stands to make training DVDs for the coaches. Generally, I shoot that from high in the stands, standing up, without a tripod.

However, my early shooting was for school paper, yearbook and the local papers printed over 60 of my game shots.

With today's equipment, try to use 1000 to 2000 for your shutter speed. Sometimes, there are benefits of blurred 1/60 sec shots of dunks, but generally motion stopped shots work best, and people like them the best.

For focusing, I set the camera to totally manual focus. Find the shutter speed that snaps the instant you press. Turn on the noise so that you can hear it, at least at first. No real point in multiple frame shots, but you can try them. I try to pump each shot off discretely. Get the timing of the players, and mark prefocus points on your lens if you can. If you are under the basket, the three point ring, and then about 2 feet after the basket. That will help get close on the focus in advance. Avoid focusing with the action, because you won't get the shots off while watching and focusing. At least I can't.

Exposures are a proposition. Things vary with jersey color and lighting, but in general I don't worry about precise exposure. Over a stop is better than under.

If you automatic settings for focus and exposure, you will get delayed captures, which will mess things up. Run manual exposure and manual focus. "Silk" or acetate bandage tape is good for marking focus points on, and does not leave residue on equipment.

If shooting from the stands, the game is different. Lead your subjects in the direction they will head. Where you can, get side line players in the frame, and coaches in the frame, even if out of focus. You are trying to tell a story, and they are part of it, even though not the focal point (no pun intended).

No athletic director that I can think of told me I couldn't use flash. One coach, for the other team recently demanded that I no use flash. I politely told him that if that is what he wanted, I would not. But I use flash about 3% of the time, and it is usually for awards shots during the event, to assure fill on the faces.

Most of the games I shoot the refs all know me. The ADs generally know me. But they do chase people off the of the court. One way I have dealt with this in basketball and in other sports is to have the coach for the team I am there to capture say a word to the athletic director. The "security" people will get told, probably by body language, and I don't get bothered.

You may get allot of requests from parents. When I did VHS and DVDs for coaches, I would tell them to get me a blank, and I would copy the game they want on to it. I gave allot of media to coaches, but I think parents gave me as much. If there were parents who I knew were financially strapped, I would just say sure, and use my media.

I had four kids who played basketball, winning state championship and exciting things like that.

For lenses, I usually have two bodies, one with a 135 and the other with something like a 200. A long time ago, I used a Vivitar 70-210 varifocal lens. Not as nice as a true zoom, but it worked. Except in when I was in high school, I could get any lens I needed, or bodies from work, so I would switch up the equipment sometimes. I definitely use a UV filter because there are aerosols in the air, and plan on getting bumped a few times if you are on the court. It just happens. Usually from a ball which you lost sight of.

Lots of times we hear people say, raw is uncompressed and jpeg is compressed.

Well not exactly.

Raw image files are not usually compressed, but it depends upon the camera system design and architecture. There are cameras which compress raw data. Perhaps not many consumer cameras, but there are many cameras which do compress raw image data. The most common compression, up until about 2000 was run length encoding (RLE). It could be cheaply implemented in hardware, ran at near maximum data transfer speeds, and did not require much extra power. RLE compression took advantage of identical pixel values in adjacent pixels.

By the same token, jpg files can also have compression shut off. Sometimes it is done for power and processing time considerations.

Also, both types of files can be treated as data files on computers, and have lossless compression applied. This often happens with utilities like zip, or xz.

A source data file which is already compressed will tend to have little advantage in getting compressed again, and often will take more space in the recompressed version. That actually forms a poorman's method of compression verification. Compressing a pre-compressed image file, and getting poor or even negative compression tends to show (but not prove) that information in the file was already compressed.

So if you keep raw files on your computer, and want to make a backup of them on a blu-ray or DVD, you can copy them to a scratch folder, and compress them with a suitable compression tool. I use xz -9e some of the time. The server I do the compression on is very fast, has lots of memory and is idle much of the time. And it helps me pack every blu-ray or DVD disc with as much information as possible. Because I don't expect to access the back up often, if ever, I am not worried about decompression processing time. I just want to reduce media costs.

For linux users, after the images are in a directory,

find . nice xz -9e {} \;

compresses each file. When that is done, and your working directory or folder are sized for your media,

mkisofs -dvd-compat -r -J -joliet-long -l -Z /dev/dvd .

will copy all the files in the directory, onto the media, in this example dvd, in an ISO file. That allows one to index to the desired file later, without reading the whole volume if an individual file is needed. Be careful to observe filename size restrictions of your operating system and of ISO9660 to make sure your files are both unique and can be accessed for later recovery.

Those running Windows can use zip or other similar utilities to compress and/or wrap groups of images together.

No form of backup is perfect. Most use harddrives, which are pretty reliable, but eventually fail. Optical media is also used, but can have failures. USB flash memory is not terribly reliable, long term. Having multiple backups is not a bad idea and having them compressed reduces the media needed.

My take is that most of us are here to just do that--learn. While absolute newbies might need analogies to get started in understanding, the sooner we transition to calling things what they are, and how they are denoted in the art, with specificity, the faster we move towards understanding. So I argue that over simplification has a risk in resulting in significant misconceptions as to how things work. Cameras and eyes are complex things, but they are readily understood. So the sooner we get there, the better off we are. And the better we can make our tools do what we want with greater reliability and certainty.

You may wish to consider the raw file the equivalent of a negative, but from a photographic science standpoint, it is not.

It seems that the principles and understanding of technology are determined by the loudness with which we can shout, rather than by the people who design and build such systems.

Film medium and digital media are two different things and operate with different principles.

Fact: raw file formats generally involve several somewhat complex processing steps.
Fact: a distinguishing attribute of raw files, although not exclusively implemented, is that they deal in a large image space, preserving full gamut and full spatial resolution.
Fact: for the vast majority of cameras, linearity, reciprocity, color mask effects, noise management, gain and offset, and spatial effects are processed prior to creation of a raw image.

The second fact listed, referring to the full gamut and full spatial resolution, are the only facts cited with a loose analogy to film. In exposing film many choices and trades are made with respect to spatial resolution and gamut, and then compounded in processing, that are not mapped well to the digital process.

We have libraries of over 50 "raw" image formats, which will show one that they are quite different, and commonly camera and sensor architecture dependent. There is no one standard.

I would disagree with the analogy. First, after image capture, there is allot that can be done in terms of processing which will affect film. An easy example is push processing.

Raw is a hardware specific data representation. Not all cameras capture rectangular images. For example push-broom devices are common in airborne and satellite applications, as well as document scanners. Conical scan is used in many sensors, and has the advantage of increased pixel density or high spatial resolution in the central viewing area, or if covering a line, along the centerline of the movement.

So when we talk raw, we are talking a generic category of data representation, which will depend upon the architecture of the camera, and any formatting or preprocessing which the designer has built in.

Preprocessing on raw? Yes. There will be gain and offset values. Photoresponsivity adjustment tables noise management algorithms, temperature and illumination non-linearity corrections, and so on.

For example, with film, a shot made in low light, or even low temperature, would need a reciprocity adjustment. Your digital camera does that for sensor non-linearities, but you don't usually see it. With film the processing was after or during development. With digital, it is normally before the creation of the "raw" output file.

A raw file may or may not have the masking processed out of it. It depends upon the architecture and the data management decisions. It may or may not have sharpening applied.

So the interested person might look at the NEF standards, or the standard their camera designer used.

The features of each are readily obtainable. Go through it, and evaluate, rank order or use whatever analysis you wish. The bodies are rather inexpensive per the quotes given. But the best person to select YOUR camera is YOU. But again, if you make the "wrong" choice, for just a couple of hundred, you can sell one and buy the other. Cheaper than renting for a month or two.

You asked specifically about the D7200 and the D7500. A bit over a year ago I was looking to buy a DSLR, and those two cameras fell into my price point. I did a feature comparison. As an image scientist from a major company in the photographic business, I have used many cameras. The features on the D7200 were slightly more favorable to me and my application, and the price was about 18% less. So that is what I bought.

Look carefully at what you think you will use.

As stupid as it sounds, a factor in selecting this line was the onboard flash. I don't use it often, but wanted it on this camera. Perhaps I made a mistake, because that feature I have used exactly 3 times in the last year or so. If you are buying refurbished, you will not loose much $$ should you end up with an incorrect decision and decide to switch later. But more likely, many people try to keep the old body. Which is why I have two display shelves with my old cameras on them.

Nice scene. I wonder if it would have a different effect without the cloud obscuring the nigh peak? Eyes like to follow ridgelines, and sometimes the ridgelines tell a story. I know one cannot move the clouds. Ha ha. The clouds in the foreground, and off to the left are good.

Do you mean any cruise ship, or that particular one with the sign?

What is your authority on that?

An ISO setting is not "gain." On one camera system it could be, but normally it is several parameters. As an example, on some sensors, there is pixel aggregation, at high "ISO" settings, which will result in lower spatial resolution, which may look like more "grain."

Pixel aggregation may be used because the electrons from several wells are aggregated together to provide a higher signal, not as suspectable to the low signal noise observed near the lower quantization level of one pixel or cell.

A typical aggregation in an area sensor is 2x2. In this case four wells are aggregated, and there is signal with lower perceived noise from four wells than from four individual wells. In reality a lower light level has a smoother quantization curve at lower light levels because there are more quantization points for a a given low light level range.

Nice.