Author: Jason Fochtman

Even though it can sometimes be difficult to get a decent exposure in a high school gym, no matter what high school you’re at, I’ve found one thing remains constant:

Unbelievable access. 

If you’ve ever shot college or professional basketball, you know you’re told where you can shoot, or more specifically the long list of where you can’t.

With high school basketball, the only direction I’ve ever received from any official body is to be aware of where the referees are and give them space to move around the baseline.

As a photographer, that opens up a wide variety of angles and opportunities to make images.

I’m going to share my process to approaching basketball games.

ACROSS THE COURT: Shooting action across the court with a telephoto lens will give you a couple of different shots, such as rebounds, steals and general defensive plays. In these photos, I’m using my Canon 300mm lens. From this angle, you can capture a lot of the emotion that comes with steal and rebounds. Plus, fast breaks coming the other way should yield clean, unobstructed shots.

As a point of reference, I’ll shoot with two camera bodies (Canon 7D as my primary body and a 30D as a backup) with two-of-three lens (Canon 18-35mm, 70-200mm or 300mm) attached at any given point.

I’ll get my safe shots out of the way.

If I’m covering both teams, I’ll start with my 70-200mm f2.8 lens and split the first eight-minute half, so I’m on both sides of the floor in the first quarter, allowing me to get shots of the both teams’ offenses and defenses.

Typically, I’m stationed behind the basket, at either corner where the paint and court meet.

Once I’ve gotten some offensive shots, I’ll mix things up by using my 300mm to grab shots that are too far away for a 70-200.

Without switching to the other side of the court, I’ll use the 300mm to get defensive shots, both out on the perimeter and up in the air rebounding, of the team that was just on offense.

You can also get a nice shots of offensive turnovers.

FROM THE BASELINE: With a wide-angle lens, you can do a number of different things. If you put your camera on the floor and tilt it slightly upward, you can give a viewer a different angle on rebound shots. This angle is also nice because it gives the viewer a sense of place. For this kind of shot, I tend to focus about a foot in front of the basket and turn the camera lens focus to manual so all you have to do is position the camera and wait for the action. Another thing you can do is position yourself on the baseline just to the edge of the paint. What I’m looking for is a player to drive from the wing to the basket -parallel to you.

If you don’t have a long lens, you can get a similar shot — you just have to move your feet to get close.

There should be a sizable gap between the scorer’s table and the row of chairs for either team.

If you shoot on either side of the scorers table, you should be able to get close enough to get defensive shots, just be aware of where coaches and players are, as some coaches will like to pace around and players will check-in at the table to sub-in.

Now that you have your safe shots, it’s time to play.

Unlike my safe shots, I’m going for low-probability, high-yielding positions.

By this I mean I’m looking for shots that I may have to be patient to get.

Remember, I already have my safe shots, so I know if I go a quarter and a half with nothing decent to show, I’m all right.

I’ll go for a couple of different shots: low-angle shot below the basket, high shot from the stands, long lens at mid court, etc.

Below basket:

This type of shot can give you a sense of place, as well as an appreciation for the athleticism players have.

I’ll point the focus of my camera with my wide-angle lens at a usually a foot or so in front of the basket. I’ll turn the lens focus from automatic to manual so the focus won’t change and lay my camera on the ground at a slight upward angle. I’ll shoot a photo to check the composition and wait for a rebound, fast-break layup, etc., to happen in front of me.

In the stands:

The great thing about shooting from the stands is how it cleans up your backgrounds and helps with your exposure, and you don’t have to necessarily have a 300mm to get shots from higher up. Even a 70-200mm lens from even a few rows up can help give you a difference vantage point.

As a bonus for shooting higher up, you can get the light from the gym shinning more directly on players’ faces as they look toward the basket filling in shadows you might have seen if you shot from the floor level.

FROM THE STANDS: Shooting from the stands will not only clean up the background, but also show you the faces of players as they battle for rebounds or go up for shots you wouldn’t see from the floor. From the stands I switch off between using my 300mm lens and my 70-200mm lens. As an added bonus, you can also get a better handle on what teams are doing both offensively and defensively, which can help you anticipate action.

You also see expressions as players go up for shots and rebounds that you may not see from the floor level.

From this point of view, I’m looking for expression and to some degree a variation of shots I get from the floor.

The other thing that can help you from this angle is you can see beyond just the pile of bodies in front of you.

In addition, it’s easier to understand plays and defensive schemes from that angle, allowing you to anticipate what will happen when and get a feel for players’ tendencies.

Images, such as player’s diving out of bounds, can be enhanced depending on your vantage point.

From higher up, you can see that play develop easier than you can from the floor.

If you get bored, you can always try other things, such as shooting completely wide angle for a while, or going super-tight from the baseline.

Mix it up, have fun and enjoy the freedom. 

During a recent high school football game, the local band wore special 'Marching for Ryan' t-shirts during the game.

It sparked my curiosity, and I found the shirts were for a band member who marched his last performance that night.

The 16-year-old sophomore is scheduled to have his 15^th and most invasive neck surgery to drain fluid and put in metal rods to support his head. According to his mom, doctors discovered a tumor when he was nine months old that required aggressive treatment. The radiation used to shrink the tumor weakened his neck muscles and has lead to Ryan having 14 surgeries.

When covering high school football, or any sport for that matter, it’s easy to zone in on the action happening on the field and forget that there are photo opportunities away from the action.

Had I just showed up to shoot the football action on the field, I would have missed this great story and feature art.

From the band, cheerleaders, student section, student council and fans, there are many different organizations that come together to make up the game day atmosphere.

If I have the time, I try to get to the game an hour beforehand, that way I can get my laptop set up in the press box, grab a roster and head down to shoot pregame images.

You should have plenty of good late afternoon light to work with, so look for students hanging signs, parents bringing in concession food and the band unloading and getting ready to come into the stadium.

Most of the time, photographers gather around the field to get the photo of the teams taking the field, next time try going up in the student section and look for students cheering.

Last Friday, I spent the first few minutes of the game in the stands instead of on the sidelines.

I walked away with some great images that none of the other photographers got that evening.

Editor’s note: This is the second of two blogposts on improving football photography at high school games.  The first one deal with how to handle bad lighting at high school stadiums. You can find it here.

In my last post, I talked about general ideas and hurdles that surround shooting a high school football game.

Now let’s look at what camera settings you could use.

More often than not, editors are looking for that one crisp action photo that tells the story of the game.

Some cameras have a “sports” settings, or as a friend once referred to it, “running man.” It’s a factory setting that will do all the guesswork for you to expose your image correctly. 

While that might seem great, my experience is that the camera guesses incorrectly more often than not when faced with one of my many dimly lit fields. 

Taking that setting out of the discussion, there are three settings most cameras have that we’ll look at in particular: AV, TV and M.

Before we get much further, a camera’s exposure is made up of three variables: shutter speed, aperture and ISO. A basic understanding of these three items will be important to understand the AV, TV and M settings.

Shutter speed is shown on your camera as a fraction, or sometimes just as a number like 250, and allows you to record a slice of time.

The higher the number, the shorter amount of time your camera captures — leading to more of those crisp stop-action photos. Obviously for sports, that’s what we’re looking for most of the time.

Recall from my last post: In general, you’ll need at least a shutter speed of 1/250th of a second (sometimes represented as 250) to stop action.  

Example shutter speed scale: (records a long time period) 1 second,…1/60, 1/80…. 1/250, 1/320, 1/400…1/2000 (records a short time period – sports and action)

Aperture deals with depth of field, or what’s in focus. The larger the aperture (the smaller the number like F2.8 – or just 2.8) the more blurred the background will be. The inverse would be true for a very detailed background. A narrow aperture, say F11.0, would give you a lot of focus. You’d use F11 for something very detailed, like a city skyline.

Example aperture scale: (Not much in focus – sports) F2.8, F3 F4 F5.6 F6, F8, F11 (Lots in focus – city skyline)

Most of the time, you’ll want the former so you can single out the player with the ball.

The last part of the equation is ISO, which measures your camera’s sensitivity to light. The lower your ISO, the less sensitive your camera will be to light. If you were out shooting on a sunny day, you could use an ISO of 100 because your camera has a lot of light to work with. Because you’re most likely shooting an evening football game, you’ll need a higher ISO because you have less light. As the game goes on, you’ll probably have to increase this because you’ll have less light to work with than when you started. 

Example: (Less sensitive – sunny day) 100, 200, 400,…..1250, 3200 (Very sensitive – evening) 

Why is this important? Because you’ll want the high shutter speed to stop action, your camera will take in less light because the shutter won’t be open long. To counterbalance that for correct exposure, you’ll need to make your camera more sensitive to the light it does take in for that short period of time.

TV:

TV or “S” as it’s sometimes labeled is a setting that stands for shutter priority. What that means is you will manually set the shutter speed and the camera will pick the aperture. Out of the three variables, you’re only adjusting two, meaning shutter speed and ISO are directly related.

The higher the shutter speed, the higher your ISO will need to be. If you’re shooting and find that you stop enough of the action to get a good shot at 1/400th of a second, you’ll need a high ISO (making your camera more sensitive to light) than if you were shooting at 1/250th. 

If you’re not ready to try your camera’s manual setting “M” yet, I’d suggest this for sports.

AV:

AV or “A” as it’s sometimes labeled is a setting that stands for aperture priority. What that means is you’ll manually set the aperture and the camera will pick the shutter speed. I typically don’t use this setting for sports, but it’s important to know what it does. If you wanted to show the crowd cheering or displaying the school hand symbol in unison, you could use this setting. You don’t have to worry about them moving as fast as the players on the field, and you want to show a lot of faces in the stands. Plus, you’ll probability need a slower shutter speed to let in more light because most of the light is directed toward the field.

Note: Some zoom lens change the aperture as you zoom in, meaning you’ll have less light to work with when you zoom all the way, than when you’re zoomed out. I’d suggest waiting for the action to come to you, instead of zooming all the way in, leading to more underexposed images (darker images). You’ll be able to shoot with higher shutter speed and still have a well-lit image if you stick with the zoom length that gives you the widest aperture (lowest number).

M:

M stands for manual or massively-intimidating setting. You are in complete control, which is both scary and empowering. You’re telling the camera that you know better than it does, so shut up and just take the darn picture. In the case of sports, I’d treat manual as dealing with two of the three variables. I’d set my aperture as low as it could go and then play with the shutter speed and the ISO like we did with TV. The difference is your camera won’t get to guess if it should use F2.8 or F8.0 to exposure your image. You’ll have already told it what to use.

Remember, one of the great things about shooting with digital is the LCD screen on the back of the camera. You can do the eyeball test. If you don’t like what you see, change the settings and try again.

One very common photo assignment around this time is the elusive wild art photo where the reporter or photographer is supposed to come back to the newsroom with this amazing front page photo.

Here are a couple of ideas of where you might go when given the assignment.

Parks and pools

While the city of Liberty doesn't have a public pool, it does have a small water park.

By this time, you've probability already run the photo of kids playing in the pool, but many community pools also have other activities such as swimming lessons and water aerobics. At parks, you might look for interesting angles on families enjoying swings or teeter tots. I'd suggest not shooting from eye level. Instead, try shooting from low on the ground (to get a clean sky background of a kid on a teeter tot), or up high as they enjoy a swing. Remember to have your press pass on and let the parents know what you're doing. Best times to find people is either early in the morning or late afternoon.

Schools

This was taken at the football fields at Cleveland High School before the start of a variety softball game. This little league team used the fields daily to practice since there is no park in Cleveland.

Sometimes families use school athletic facilities like baseball or softball fields to work one-on-one with their child. Those could make for good photos. Little league teams also tend to use open fields at high schools for practices. Best times are similar to parks and school.

Community centers

This was by far the strangest and coolest camp I went to this summer. This man in the community has been yo-yoing for more than 40 years and put on a camp to teach kids a fun pastime. Over the four-day camp he taught kids 12 tricks.

I found community centers to be full of wild art potential. From Yo-Yo camps to line dancing classes, they can provide several different opportunities at one convenient location. It wouldn't be a bad idea to run by your center once a month and get a copy of their calendar so you'll know what the center has going on that day.