The Sports Photo Guy

With no sports this week, I dipped back to an exceptionally busy stretch last week for today’s entry: and it was a mistake.

VMI’s “loot and shoot” offense was running away from the Radford Highlanders on Thursday, January 13 at Radford’s Dedmon Center.  VMI swingman Keith Gabriel took a backdoor pass to the hoop and threw down a monster dunk.

How it was made.

All photographers make mistakes; most will admit when some of their best shots result from one.  Such was the case here!

I was experimenting with my first floor-mounted remote camera, a Nikon D40 attached to an OverXposed Pro Mini Platform.  I had manually metered the scene but foolishly left the camera in aperture-priority mode at f2.8.  The highly-backlight scene was too much for the D40′s metering system and the image was over-exposed (not the mounting plate’s fault!) at 1/80 @ f2.8.  While the image blur from such a slow shutter speed ruined many of the shots that night, by catching Gabriel at the apex of his “swing” from the rim after the dunk (despite the appearance, he was moving from left to right in the frame), it works perfectly with just enough ball movement.

Because of my mistake in setting Aperture priority mode, the NEF out of the camera needed a good bit of work, but Adobe Camera Raw handled it nicely.  NeatImage provided noise reduction to the ISO 1600 image.  The lens?  Trusty old 28/f2.8D, manually pre-focused.  The camera was oriented vertically but I cropped across the frame for this particular image.

The experiment was a success: not just for the great image, but important lessons learned about not second-guessing your manual exposure and that the D40 is a lousy remote camera with its infra-red trigger!