Sunday, December 2, 2012

Stanford at Gonzaga, 2 December 2012

Dave Cortesi

We have posted 15 shots to a smugmug gallery including this one of Taylor shooting the longest of her six three-pointers:

A bit of photo nerdery here (non-photographers just go on about your business...). We were traveling light for this quick weekend trip to the Inland Empire. Also we knew that our seats were in the top row of a sold-out arena. So I took only one lens, a 50mm f1.8. Not a zoom, a fixed focal length that, on a digital SLR, is a medium telephoto.

Because of the wide aperture I could shoot at 1/800th at ISO 200. But this was the full-frame field of view from our seats in row 32:

It made shooting pretty simple. No worries about composition. Just point the camera in the general direction of the basket, wait for something to happen, and click. Then rely on the camera having enough pixels that a decent composition can be cropped out of the full image afterward. Because of the low ISO setting, there isn't much noise in the images so even a tight crop is still a pretty clean picture.