Reviving images from 2 college basketball games in the 2007-08 season

If you're a regular visitor to Photo Potpourri, you're aware that in the past couple years, I've gone back to some of my very old shoots -- those I did before launching this blog in 2008 -- to breathe life into images for which at the time I had insufficient tools to deal with properly in post-processing. In most cases, it was a simple matter of restoring detail to shadowed areas of an image.

The challenge in those photos was that I shot them all in JPG format (I didn't begin shooting in RAW format until 2009), so I had limited opportunities to recover accurate exposure and color information. Still, I had success with a lot of the images in the "revival" effort.

I recently decided to do the same thing with two college basketball shoots from November 2007. The first, between Butler and Indiana State universities, was on Nov. 15 at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, the home court of Butler. The other was 11 days later  in a game between the University of Indianapolis and Franklin College at Nicoson Hall on the UIndy campus.

There were a variety of challenges with those shoots -- I learned only afterward that I had inadequate gear and, in my opinion, significantly inferior lighting at the UIndy arena. Indeed, both arenas also had unlevel lighting -- brighter in the center/midcourt areas, darker at the ends where the hoops were located. I will note that lighting at Hinkle was better than that at Nicoson.

Also, I was pretty new at doing sports photography indoors. I had shot high school basketball 30 years previously, but back then I was shooting black-and-white film, and I had a dark-room technician willing and able to push my film's ASA to 1000 or more during the chemical development process.

In 2007, my primary camera was a Canon 30D, which had a regular ISO ceiling of 1600 that could be doubled to 3200 if I wanted. But pictures shot with the 30D at ISO levels above 800 reflected significant degradation due to noise. So my camera was inadequate. On top of that, my fastest lens at the time was a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8, hardly an ideal tool for indoor sports. I had an OK aperture, but for indoors sports you generally need reaches of 80 to 250 millimeters.

So to get even close to proper exposure, I found myself shooting wide open (f/2.8) at 1/250 and ISO 1000 (just over my "threshold") in a lot of shots. 1/250 doesn't cut it in a fast-moving game like basketball. I was afraid to push the ISO to 1600 (or even 3200) because I didn't know there was such a thing as noise-reduction software at the time. Six months or so later, I bought Noiseware noise-reduction software and went back to many of the pictures from those two games and used it on them.

Finally, I lacked knowledge that a camera had a continuous-focus tracking mechanism to help keep more photos sharp. The 30D had such a tool (AI Servo), but at the time, AI Servo sounded like gibberish to me and I hadn't "discovered" it, much less explored it. AI Servo would make a significant difference a year or so later when I finally looked into it for subsequent sports shoots. But because I didn't use it while shooting the 2007 basketball games, quite a few photos from the shoot had to be tossed summarily. The focus on quite a lot of the pictures ended up being on the background instead of the subject(s) in the foreground. The few pictures that turned out tack sharp were the result of dumb luck, I guess.

One other piece of background information relative to the basketball shoots should be in this post. In November 2007, I was more than halfway through a photography correspondence course I had enrolled in through the New York Institute of Photography. (My experience in this course was one of my very first posts after Photo Potpourri launched in late 2008). My interest in shooting these basketball games was driven primarily by a need to fulfill an assignment associated with a recently completed chapter in the NYIP course pertaining to sports and action photography. I had to submit a photo depicting action.

I submitted the photo you see leading off the post, my favorite from the UIndy game shoot. (The requirements were to show one of these three: action that was frozen, as in this photo, blurred movement, or a panned shot in which the subject is still but the background is blurred. Personally, I think NYIP should have required one example of each, but that's my opinion).

As always, to view a larger, sharper (hopefully?) version of a photo, simply click on the image. This is particularly helpful when accessing the blog from a mobile device. To view full galleries of all the images I made (good and bad), click on this link for the UIndy game pictures, and this link for the Butler game pictures.

Above: I was very excited about this shot, and I cropped it both horizontally (as you see in the lead-off photo), and with a pseudo-vertical orientation (shown above). Neither is the original composition, however. The original contains the full length body of UIndy player Keith Radcliffe (14) taking a shot while defended by Franklin's Marty Young (44).

The next favorites of mine from that shoot feature UIndy Greyhounds guard Tyke Cocherham (5) doing a pretzel-twist under-the-basket reverse layup (above) and dribbling around a Franklin defender along the baseline (first below). In the second photo below, I have another shot of Keith Radcliffe, moments before he leaped to put up the shot shown in the lead-off photo.   

Above: Freshman Tyler Kitchel (30) dribbling into and around the stiff arm of a Franklin defender.

Above: A Franklin player is guarded by UIndy's Myron Jackson (23). (If you're wondering why I'm not identifying the Franklin athletes by name, it's because the school doesn't have a 2007-08 roster available online as do UIndy, ISU and Butler).

Above: UIndy's leading scorer in the 2007-08 season was DeAndre Brock (32), shown putting up this jump shot. 

Above: From the Butler game, this shot of Indiana State's Adam Arnold pulling down a rebound probably is my favorite because it depicts some action ... and (most importantly) is those that turned out tack sharp. 

Above: Because of the limited focal range on my Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8, the only shots I had a decent chance to keep in sharp focus were those in my vicinity, like this one of Butler senior guard A.J. Graves. I had several other interesting shots of Graves elsewhere in the game, but they were not in focus.  

Above: Another shot of action coming toward me, this time Butler's Drew Streicher (32) passing off the ball to a player out of the picture. 

Butler's Zach Hahn dribbling around a defender (above) and three-point shooting specialist Pete Campbell (34) launching a jumper near the free-throw line (below). I played with the orientation of the photo below before deciding to use Campbell (on the right) and the referee (on the left) as my reference points. Yes, it appears like the court is going downhill, but ... even 11 years afterward, it still doesn't bother me too much. 

Above: Senior guard Mike Green (10), who had transferred to Butler from Towson, proved to be a valuable pickup for the Bulldogs, beginning the previous season. The Bulldogs would finish the 2007-08 season with a 30-4 record, which included a first-place 16-2 finish in the Horizon League and a league postseason tournament championship (which gave them an automatic berth into the NCAA Tournament). Butler beat South Alabama in the first round of the NCAA's before falling to Tennessee 76-71 in overtime in the second round. Below is another shot coming toward me, a safe composition for assuring sharpness when I had no continuous-focus activated.

Above and below: Fans in the legendary "Dawg Pound," who camp out at every home game in the seating area behind the east goal.