Basketball with hotshoe flashes

[dhyravy]

Here are a couple from the district championship game tonight taken using 2 small Quantaray QBSZ-370 hotshoe flashes at 1/4 power mounted on the handrail 10 rows up on the corners of the baseline and fired with ebay triggers. (ala Strobist) This setup gave me:

ISO - 400
Aperture - f4
Shutter - 1/500
Metering - Center Weighted
Autofocus - Center
Nikkor 80-200 AF-D 2.8

You really don't NEED $1000 worth of strobes and triggers to get great results!

[JSPhoto]

Yeah, that worked out well. Nice inexpensive settup there.
I may be taking the plunge though and getting strobes for next year. I will have a place to set them up at one football field as well....that could be interesting!

JS

[dhyravy]

I have been trying to come up with a feasible method to use for football. The problem is the shear amount of ground that the game covers. I have used the same flashes mentioned above with the exception of the spring clamps, using light stands instead. It worked fairly well for about 20 yards at a time with a flash on each side of the field. If you don't need to cover plays all over the field it's OK. I think that larger strobes would give you more coverage but nuking the field that heavily might also get them turned off. My son-in-law has coached at the NCAA level at WVU and EKU but has since taken over the high school here. He has said that the small flashes don't bother him or the players at all. However, he has mentioned how distracting the big strobes that one of the area papers uses at basketball games can be.

[JSPhoto]

I'd just use the strobes for football in the endzones. I can see strobes being placed improperly as being a problem though, especially in a gym, maybe that papers photog needs to be told to move them to a different location.

JS