Lately I've been using that basketball ceiling bounce trick an awful lot, and it's beat out my other methods - the Canon infrared wireless system, on-camera flash, and going commando - so far. Last week I tried using two 580s, one on-camera master and one as the slave, and that was a disaster. The slave fired a full second after the master, and only fired at all when I was within 10 feet! Useless, totally useless.
However, bounce flash has worked quite well. I turned out some really nice images in the past two weeks. We're just getting into CIF basketball games, my very favorites. The bleachers are full, the crowd is passionate, access is restricted so you don't get people running into your gear or in front of the lens. The players are brilliant, great action, and tons of emotion. And the best part - all players are wearing the right jerseys (usually with numbers on both front AND back!) and coaches always bring a roster! Those two factors make my life so much easier.
The downside of this season is that I'm also shooting a lot of soccer. Night soccer, on dimly lit fields. The play ranges far and wide, so there is absolutely no way to light it except on-camera. Action is hit and miss, the referees are uptight, the stadium lights create hotspots and every field has black holes, devoid of even the puniest photons. It wouldn't be so bad if I had a 70-200, a 400, anything with sharper glass than my cheapo 70-300. I end up follow focusing so much because the autofocus is sketchy. Even so, the glass isn't sharp anymore and I end up with fuzzy images that need a lot of post-processing. Which I hate.
But editing those basketball photos is a real dream, and that almost makes up for slogging through hundreds of fuzzy, noisy soccer shots. The latest basketball game fit onto just one card and editing took less than a half hour! The images needed almost nothing, just a bit of sharpening and color balance (just barely). Here are a few from a game last week:
Sleep well, and dream of Pocket Wizards...
Kudos to you if you caught that Princess Bride reference. Greatest movie ever.
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