March Madness

Could there possibly be a better sporting event than March Madness? I know it’s a stretch to think of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship as one event when there are actually 68 teams in the field and somewhere around 862 games played. But for three weeks, a big chunk of the world’s male population forgets that they really don’t care that much about basketball and glues themselves to the television to see if Butler, Gonzaga, or some other underdog will emerge as this year’s Cinderella in sneakers, dashing their bracket and bragging rights to smithereens.

I was recently asked by a friend to take some photos of a local basketball league for his church’s website. Not exactly the big dance, but an opportunity to learn, nonetheless. The only problem—his church’s gym is lighted with a minimal number of fluorescent fixtures. No high-bay metal halides. No downlights from the overhead scoreboard. From a photography standpoint, it might as well be lighted by a couple of lilac bath candles and a kid with a green glowstick. I’m talking dark.

Not to be deterred, I schemed up an idea based on my travels to college arenas, where real sports photogs use the built in light system. So with two 340 watt/second Alien Bee moonlights on lightstands bouncing off of the white ceiling and fired wirelessly with a radio trigger, I was able to get f2-1/50 ambient light to look something like f8-1/250. Just what I needed to stop some action. They aren’t great compositions or works of art. No matter how much I encouraged them, the players ran around wherever they wanted to go, oblivious to the rule of thirds or my needs. But I learned a new technique that worked very well, and hopefully populated a Baptist website with the best darn recreation league basketball photos ever taken in a middle-Georgia church gym in March. Now that’s madness.