recommended light setting for high school gym

I was wondering what you would recommend for settings/mode for a

basketball game in a high school gym.

I have a canon 10d, 50mm 1.8, 24-70 2.8 USML and a canon 550 Flash.

Thanks for the help.

Bryan,

<p>First off, make sure flash is allowed during the game! Many, many schools do not allow flash during the game. What I do bring my fastest lenses and shoot wide open at the lowest ISO I can get away with and still not blur the action too badly. Some high school gyms are like caves and you end up shooting 1600 ISO at f/1.8 at 1/250. I wish I were kidding!

<p>Good luck,

<p>Sean

<br><a href="http://www.stnphotography.com">www.stnphotography.com</a>

Bryan--

I am sure that what Sean said about restrictions on flash is true, at least in some places. I, however, have never run into a situation where I was asked not to use flash for high school basketball.

I actually coach a high school team, and I know that I would never tell a photographer not to use it--it's not that distracting for a basketball player, at least when he is not shooting free throws.

Still, as the adage goes, it's easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission. (I would bet that, even if you could figure out who was in charge of gym supervision, they would likely have no idea whether there was a policy on/problem with using flash.) I would go ahead and use it, until someone asked me to stop.

You will be less distracting to the players if you move a little closer to the sideline than to the lane. I usually like to grab a spot midway between the basket and the sideline, and focus on the near block (I usually use manual focus). By doing so, the area around the basket is in focus, as well as an arc out to the 3-point line in which much of the action will occur.

As Sean also said, most high school gyms are really dark, and the action is fast. I usually underexpose the ambient light by a stop, and use my flash as my key light (which is the opposite of what I normally do for H.S. football). This helps, to an extent, avoid the nasty dark shadows from the players on the walls and ceiling which will happen if you use too fast a shutter speed, or the utterly black backgrounds that result from closing your aperture down too much. (I am simplifying things just a bit here, before someone jumps on me.)

At 1/250 of a second, you will just begin to freeze the action. At 1/125, you will get a high proportion of blurry shots, if you leave your aperture open wide.

In most cases, when shooting at 1600 ISO, I generally set the flash on TTL, often with -0.3 compensation, and can usually get away with shooting at about 1/200 at F4 or so. Of course, these settings vary depending on the quality of lighting in the gym.

Nice thing is, with digital, you can experiment with your settings until you get a shutter speed/aperture/flash combination that you can see works right away.