Final phase of basketball trilogy

[Bob32]

To date I have posted photos taken during six of the eight basketball games I shot on December 6 and 7 at a local tournament. This post includes images shot during games 7 and 8 on December 7.

Comments are welcome.


Bob



1. Photos #1 through #3 were shot during the contest between Pleasant Valley High and Washington High. For a while it looked like PV High would be playing crosstown rival Chico High the next day, but Washington managed to eke out a one-point win at 59-58. Player #3 scored a game-high 22 points and made four 3s for PV.


2. Player #34 had 12 points for PV.


3.


4. Photos #4 through 6 were shot during the game between Chico High and Oak Ridge High. Chico had an easy time of it and won 56-33.


5.


6. This was shot at the 35 mm. setting on the 24-85 zoom attached to my D700. I didn't attend the finals on December 8, but Chico High won the tournament for the third year in a row.

[Old Timer]

Very nice, just what I have grown to expect from your work. I like the nice tight action of #3 and 4, that is one of the things I have been working on.

[Bob32]

Very nice, just what I have grown to expect from your work. I like the nice tight action of #3 and 4, that is one of the things I have been working on.

Larry,


Thanks for your kind remarks.


#3 was shot with my 80-200 at the 80 mm. setting and #4 with my 24-85 at the 50 mm. setting. Both were cropped significantly to get the appearance of being shot tight. The area of #3 is only 40% of the area of the original image and #4 only 27%. I prefer shooting a bit "loose" and allowing cropping to render them "tight." I've tried shooting tighter, but found that the images I captured often lacked elements that I wanted to include in the frame.


I appreciate tight cropping, but I like to include enough of the environment to provide context. I notice that the pro sports photogs often crop their images much too tightly for my taste. The athletes in their images sometimes appear to be confined in tightly restricted boxes with no room for movement at all. All context is thereby lost.


For compositional purposes I crop virtually every image I edit, whether or not it's a sports image.


Bob

[Old Timer]

I spent a lot of time looking at some of SI's images recently and decided to give the tight crop images a little more play. I agree with you in that 95% of all my images end up with some type of crop. With all that said I'll also say that I have been shooting a lot wider at MSU games because the sports media people need horizontals for their web site and I find that I can sometimes make the same image work for both a vertical that I prefer and a horizon that they require.

[Bob32]

I spent a lot of time looking at some of SI's images recently and decided to give the tight crop images a little more play. I agree with you in that 95% of all my images end up with some type of crop. With all that said I'll also say that I have been shooting a lot wider at MSU games because the sports media people need horizontals for their web site and I find that I can sometimes make the same image work for both a vertical that I prefer and a horizon that they require.

Larry,


I've lately been taking a number of horizontal shots at the 35 mm. setting on my 24-85 zoom. That's wide enough to capture the action and high enough to include the net. A number of these have lent themselves well to cropping vertical.


Bob

[Old Timer]

I do much the same with the 28-70. i think I have mentioned before that I use the 12-24 right under the basket for some dramatic effect shots.