Outdoor 3X3 basketball is awesome!

Three summers ago I had decided to go to Rotterdam to test out my new Zeiss 15mm distagon lens. My plan was to walk out to the waterfront and get complicated cityscapes and shots of cranes, loading docks, and any other industrial machinery I could find. About five minutes after I left the station, I bumped into a large group of basketball games being played in a plaza outside the Pathe theatre there. I asked about the games and was told that the most interesting ones would be played a few hours later. I said thanks and continued to walk around Rotterdam. None of the shots of the waterfront were very interesting, so I came back to the basketball game, asked Alpha Sow, one of the organizers, for permission to park myself under the basket to get some shots, and proceeded to luck into the game ending victory dunk shot (see below).

After the game, Alpha told me they would have more games in Den Haag a week or two later. I wanted to go, but thought the 15mm was too wide and that I should get an auto focus lens to catch the fast action in the game. To do this, I picked up a Nikkor 35mm 1.4G (the best 35mm lens Nikon makes) and brought it to the game. This time, I got some decent action shots during the games, and another nice dunk shot. More importantly, it was a lot of fun to shoot the action in the game. Almost a year later, I got a surprise email from one of the organizers, Gerger Emmen, asking if I'd like to shoot the finals that year for the NBB (Nederlands Basketball Bond). It would be a paid shoot and I'd be 'official' in the sense that I'd wear an orange vest that identified me as with the NBB and allowed me to shoot pretty much wherever I wanted. For those games, I brought two cameras (a D800 and an A7r) along with three new lenses (An Otus 55mm, Leica 35mm, Nikkor 85mm, and a Zeiss 135mm ZA). Of the group, I had bought the Zeiss specifically for the game, but the other three I'd gotten earlier for other purposes. Again though, it was great fun shooting the game and I got some decent shots out of it. The 135mm lens wasn't easy to shoot, but I could tell that it was a good lens when I saw the results at home. Despite this, I obviously needed more practice because most of the shots taken with it didn't come out. The 85mm Nikkor also didn't work out very well. Ironically, the two manual lenses--the Otus and the Leica--were responsible for almost all of the good shots. This is because I had been trying to use the AF on the other two lenses to focus while the players were moving. They were too fast for this to work though, so it would have been better to focus on a spot and then wait for the players to cross the plane of focus--exactly as I used the MF lenses. This year I was invited to shoot the finals again, with the same deal as the previous year. Unfortunately I couldn't do it because I was scheduled to be in Thailand the weekend of the finals. However, I didn't want to miss out on the games, so I went to five of the preliminary events, and shot them with a Phase One medium format camera and a single off camera flash. I was told it was really dumb and overkill to use this setup, but in the end I like these photos better than any of the rest, so I'm totally happy with the choice of equipment. The Nikon might be able to capture many more images per second in a burst than the MF camera, but that made me more careful when using the Phase One and I got many more keepers as a result. Below are some shots from this year:

In the last game I attended, I found that I could get better shots if I tracked the players physically. That is, instead of turning the camera from a single vantage point, I ran back and forth to match the movements of the player I wanted to get a picture of. This gave me some exercise and again resulted in more acceptable photos. I look forward to the next Streetball Masters, or any other outdoor basketball action, because it is always a pleasure to shoot. AP