Regional Semi-Finals • Burke Catholic v Albertus Magnus • 8 Mar 2011

Regional Semi-Finals • Burke Catholic v Albertus Magnus • 8 Mar 2011 a photo by John Meore on Flickr.

Westchester County Center, White Plains, NY:
Burke Catholic of Section 9 takes on Albertus Magnus of Section 1 in the Regional Semi-finals for Class B division.
Once again I need to thank Chet Gorgon, who shot the first 2 games and left the strobes up for me. This time he set them in the rafters of the County Center. 4 Canon Speedlights, mounted in the catwalk on the railing fired with Pocket Wizards. Although the ambient light was high and the strobes not so powerful, it worked OK.
I was able to pull off some good shots. Not too much motion blur due to shooting at 1/250-1/320th, the strobes were able to freeze most of the action.
Timing and proper lighting make shooting basketball all than much better. You want to shoot images that will make the paper, not necessarily shots that will sell on a website.
For this game, it was an 8:00PM game and the paper's deadline is around 9:45pm... this doesn't leave much time. So, I showed up early, said hello to all the other newspaper guys, talked to the reporters, got a roster of the teams for captioning, set up my laptop, made sure the internet was working. So when game time arrived, I was ready to go. At half time, I loaded the images I had, and was able to select about 8 really good image. Second half, wait for the jubilation or rejection shot, this time the team we were covering won. I was able to grab a shot of two players doing a chest bump. Back to the laptop to up-load, select, edit, caption, transmit by 9:45, pack-up the gear and out the door at 10:15.