3X3 basketball at the Zuiderpark Sportcomplex in Den Haag

This past Monday was the day after Easter. To celebrate the day off, I went to Den Haag for a day of shooting basketball at their Sportcomplex in the Zuiderpark. By checking a map, I saw that the park was just a ten minute walk from the station, but it was raining, so I decided to take a cab. Thirty-one euros later, I was at the park. Apparently, I wasn't looking at the map at the right zoom level, so inside what I thought were a series of short streets, there were dozens of other streets, but I missed those. It was the second-most expensive cab ride I've taken in the Netherlands. "On the way back" I thought, "I'm taking the tram!"

The Sportcomplex was a huge modern building in the middle of a large park. There was a miniature train for kids, a restaurant, and other athletic facilities. Inside, I ran into Martin Ho Sui Sang, from the Nederlands Basketball Bond (NBB) who directed me to the courts inside the building. The room was evenly-lit and the walls were bright neutral colors. Both of these factors were good for taking photographs. They would still be dim for the camera when shooting at high speed, but there wouldn't be any danger of players being surrounded by inky blackness, as happens when interior courts have dark walls.

Unfortunately, I hadn't been able to secure an assistant for the day, so I didn't have a flash with me. This meant all photos would be "natural" light only, and shot with a high ISO of 3200. Most were shot between 1/1,000s-1/2,000s and a 2.8 aperture. This meant that focus would be difficult, causing a high loss ratio of as many as 7 of 10 shots being out of focus. To mitigate that possibility, I used auto focus on specific markings on the court, switched to manual, and then drew a mental arc that passed through that point to see where the trigger points should be for optimal focus. When a player passed, or was about to pass through those points, I fired the shutter and hoped for the best.

I brought my Nikon D800, with an 80 mm f/1.4G lens, thinking that the large aperture would make the most of the light in the room. However, the room seemed bright enough to use my Phase One camera with an f/2.8 lens, so I used that instead, to get the higher 100 MP resolution images it can make.

There were about eight courts laid out in the room, each separated from it's neighbors by about one meter. It may have been as much as two meters, but it felt quite narrow, as if someone could touch the edge of one court with their hand, and the adjacent court with a foot. This, I discovered, was a problem. The reason is that while taking pictures, I was paying attention to the court in front of me. Anything going on behind me was totally ignored. This meant that errant balls and players were much more likely to bump into me because I had no warning of imminent collisions. This happened twice in quick succession, when a player ran right into me from one side, then I got nailed by a ball from the other. After that, I tried to keep one eye on each court.

The challenge is to make exciting photographs, preferably more exciting every time. My opinion is that the lighting is very important to achieve that, so when it can't be controlled, you can only go so far. In those situations, camera angle, cropping, and the athlete's pose become the dominant factors in the appeal of an image. For these photos, I decided to go with a HAL2000 clean room look, like in "2001: A space odyssey". This meant a high ISO to ensure maximum brightness, and style modifications in post to heighten the impression of large flat walls and artificial brightness.

Here are a few of the shots from Monday's game: