High School Basketball – Pullman vs West Valley – Feb. 11, 2022

It’s been nearly four years since I shot a basketball game. I took my Canon 6D with my trusty 70-200 lens. I got a new f/1.2 30mm prime lens. I put that on the 70D. As I shot I noticed the 70D consistently produced images with more grain. My 6D is a newer body. I set both of them to around f/3.3 with a shutter speed of 1/800 and auto ISO. As I look through the photos I can tell which ones were from the 6D and which were from the 70D based on the grain.

Tonight’s game against West Valley high school was senior night. It also meant Pullman would win the leave championship with a victory. Throughout the game Pullman pretty much controlled everything. Shortly after the third quarter started West Valley made a bit of a run and made it close but it didn’t take Pullman long to start running away again.

Following the game I got a few shots of the players celebrating their league championship.

I am not expert at shooting basketball. It is challenging because it seems bright inside the gym unless you’re shooting photos. So I have to compromise on the f/stop and shutter speed to get the photo without too much noise.

On top of that I have no idea what I am doing when cropping the photos. Obviously, I am trying to tell a story. I re-cropped these photos a second time. In some cases I thought the facial expressions of the players were being missed due to all the extra information in the photo. I am happier with the second cropping. In some photos I left the full body to show the height of the jump or the other battle taking place. In other cases it is upper body to show the facial expressions.

I have a friend who loves black and white sports photos. I changed all the photos I chose for this collection into black and white photos. I chose several that I thought looked pretty cool and included them in this upload.

Author: scotty

Cameras: Canon 6D Mark II; Canon 70D (glass: Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM; Canon EF 2.0X III Extender; Canon EF Lens 50mm 1:1.8 STM; Canon Zoom Lens EF-S 18-135mm 1:3.5-5.6 IS STM; Canon Compact-Macro Lens EF 50mm 1:2.5 with Canon Life Size Converter EF; Canon EF-S 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 IS STM) Nokia Lumia 920 (glass: Random binoculars) Kodak Z612