Kenny Langhorne and Ibrahim Gariba leap for a rebound
Setting up a remote camera behind the backboard for a basketball game was “interesting” today. For the Guildford Heat v London Capitals BBL game, I was fortunate enough to be given very good access by Mike Davies, general manager of Guildford Heat, and be helped by the Spectrum staff.
Firstly, the Spectrum use a basket arrangement that folds away, and has to be jacked up hydraulically. This meant waiting until the basket was in place before starting to fix the camera. However, whilst it was down I used some acrylic polish to try and clean the front and back. Unfortunately the perspex is covered in a mess of scratches which wouldn’t polish out and hampered image quality significantly.
Once the basket was jacked up, I went up a ladder and fixed the Manfrotto Magic Arm (the one with the knurled tightening knob, not the lever) to one of the stantions behind the backboard. Then, I positioned the camera on the above the basket looking down to get the basket and floor in shot. I targeted the right side (as you face the basket) as it’s the most popular side for right-handed shooters to come in close. The camera, a Canon 1DIII was fitted with a 15mm fisheye set to manual focus. I set the max/min aperture range on the camera to f/5.6-f/4.0 to get some decent depth of field (f/2.8 would be too narrow), and focused somewhere I hoped was about 6′ off the ground. The 15mm fisheye turned out to be rather too wide, so next time I’ll pop a 17-40 on and not have to crop so much.
The camera was set in shutter priority mode at 1/500th with auto-ISO to bounce the ISO up to whatever would get the right exposure. It was also shooting in RAW as I wasn’t able to do a white balance check with game lighting whilst setting up.
Hanging from the camera was a Pocket Wizard II radio trigger. The trigger cord was a MicroSync N3 cord (£15) with a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adaptor. Lots cheaper than buying a £90 Pocket Wizard cable! I also taped a black card beneath the camera to cancel out reflections from the floor. In retrospect I didn’t do this right – I used a flat card and should have made a cone-shape. Also as the wall behind the basket is white, the black stood out quite a lot so I may go for a lighter colour next time. The referees were fine with it though.
Once all assembled and tested, I tied some webbing straps onto the arm and camera just in case the arm came loose.
Due to the somewhat opaque perspex, a lot of the shots lack contrast and detail – like shooting through a dirty window. Hopefully I’ll persuade Guildford Heat to invest in some new perspex, or I’ll get the elbow grease out and polish the thing myself.
My colleague Gordon had the job of triggering the remote camera at the right time, a job which he performed with excellent precision whilst I was shooting the game with my other camera. I came away with about 7 cracking remote camera pics which, after some serious post processing, actually look pretty good.
Oh, and Guildford thrashed London Capital 85-52.
