Canada Games Athletes-Basketball player Laura McCaffrey

Today's New Brunswick Canada Games team member is basketball player Laura McCaffrey. Being indoors gives you total control over the light, as you can use the flashes at higher power levels to overpower the ambient light, or turn the lights down or off indoors!


I had previously done an interesting shot of another player where I light up the backboard with one flash and used another one on her, so I thought I'd try it again.

Since I could bring the lights closer and didn't need full power to match the ambient sunlight as with other shoots, I used an umbrella on her to soften the light. I still found the light on the backboard was too bright and contrasty, so I decided to try something. I place a flash directly underneath the net pointed straight up, which resulted in this:
Definitely made for a cooler light! So I used that set up instead to light up the backboard and it provided much better results.



The old toss up the ball is a staple of mine, as the sports editor will tell you. You've already seen some with the softball people, and trust me, you will see more.


I then decided to try to incorporate another element, the scoreboard.
For this shoot, I had turned off the lights on the half of the gym I was working on to prevent any of the lovely gym light ambient from turning my subject orange/red. The scoreboard is bright enough to stand out.


The to add a sense of movement, I tried some shots using zooming, rotating, and panning the lens at a slower speed, anywhere from 1/30th of a second to 1/8th of a second. As you can see with the one below, even though I have the lights off on this side of the gym, the slower speed is picking up some of the ambient light from the other side which started adding some red/orange to the image.



I finished off with bringing Laura farther out from the basket, which allowed me to leave some black space and worked out nice too. One of these ended up running the full height of the page, looked pretty cool!


To see more in this series, head to my Canada Games Athlete Galleries on my site. I will be posting the images from each shoot after they have run in the paper, so keep checking back!
You can read the full story by Sports editor Randy O'Donnell about Laura here.
Next up, golfer Jennifer Armstrong, who was the first shot I did for the series!