Rock Paper Scissors SHOOT! YMCA Youth Basketball Highlights

Click the picture for highlights from basketball season in the Metuchen YMCA league.

If you’d like to see an awesome slide show of highlights from the 9/10-year-old full season, send me an email or post a comment. I love the one above! Mike is so good at encouraging Grex to play.

I was experimenting with shutter speed in an attempt to capture a sense of motion in the players. Shutter speed: 1/50 sec. But that’s no way to shoot an entire basketball game so just one is enough. By the way, if you’re experimenting with your camera by taking pictures at basketball games (Hi Sharon!), you can find out the specific details of each shot by looking at the image meta data on your computer. Let me know if you need help finding that.

Sharon and I were talking a lot at the games about ISO, aperture, shutter speed — or rather, how to take pictures at an indoor basketball game and have them mostly come out looking ok, and maybe include some shots with an interesting perspective as well. In the one above, I was demonstrating how a wide aperture results in a shallow depth of field. We wanted to shoot this so that the boy in the foreground would be in focus and the players blurry, but not so blurry that you wouldn’t be able to tell it was a ball game, so we set the aperture so that it wasn’t too wide. 135mm lens. Aperture: f/3.5. An aperture of f/1.8 would have rendered the background people as a blurry blob.

In contrast, this shot is sharper throughout the frame. For this one, I used a 35mm lens, and because the gym is fairly dark and I don’t like to use flash during the games, I have my ISO set really high, on 6400, and my shutter speed as slow as I can push it and still stop the motion, 1/800 sec and the aperture is set wide, on f/2.8, so that I can take advantage of as much of the available light as possible. Notice the background isn’t blurry though. That’s because the lens is a much wider angle lens than the 135mm lens used in the picture above this one.

Somebody on that team scored.

Thanks, Coach!

It’s interesting to watch the younger siblings.

Because of the high diffused windows in the gym, the light can be interesting, with bright spots here and there, causing a dramatic effect similar to the sort of light used on movie sets, except movie sets use a LOT more light.

This is another example of the dramatic light in that gym working to help this shot’s drama. Tip: find a great spot to stand and then just follow the action until the light happens to fall where you want it to fall.

The boys were deciding who was going in to play in the next sub round. Does rock beat scissors? Crushes the scissors, right? I get so confused.

Opposing 13s.

Grex’s advantage is his height. He’s in the green shirt in the back.

Rebound!

That’s a nice action shot.

That’s a nice action shot too.

That’s Grex in the green again. I like how this shot shows his reach with his long arms, and the bulldog in the top corner, and the perfectly positioned Y on the basketball.

Our coaches did a great job!

Another sibling shot.

I like the position of Grex’s hands in this shot. Compositionally speaking, it leads our eye up from the corner toward the center of the frame.

Another nice action shot.

Love to see people reading the printed newspaper!

GO GREEN!

Another fave sibling shot.

Great job, coach!

I love the angles, focus, colors and light in this shot. It’s cool that all three boys are looking in different directions even though their bodies are straight on to the camera.

Trophy day.

Coaching.

That’s an interesting shot. I like the variety of colors, the light and the shadows and the drama of the action.

Since one of our games was snowed out, the makeup game was held in the small gym at the Metuchen YMCA.

Challenging light in that gym too. Besides the fact that a nor’easter was blowing outside and the window light was very dark, the ceiling lights have varying color temperatures. It was hard to know how to shoot in there for a realistic color reproduction. The reason the boys’ hair looks green is because the light directly over their heads was casting a greenish light straight down. Lights from the sides are casting blue and some other ones are casting a yellowish color. Meanwhile, the window wall is casting a lot of evenly gray daylight from a dark overcast sky.

You can sort of see the light problem in this picture. The three ceiling lights in the crop are each casting a different color light.

I don’t know what happened, but it LOOKS like high drama.

This is one of my favorite action shots of the season.

Trophy day. Can you spot the child of a mamarazzi in this shot? One of these days, he’s going to let go of the whole “stop taking my picture” thing. Still, the team looks awesome! Congratulations Team Green! You had a great season and you all improved so much!

Thanks again to our awesome coaches, and to the Y for providing much needed physical activity programming for our kids. We’ll be back next year! (Hope to see some of you at the Y’s track and field program, coming up in April. Become a YMCA Facebook Fan for all the latest info.)