Amami Superman Photography

Our daughter, Jade, started basketball last year and has been having a blast. I've going to see most of all her games and I've taken plenty of photos, but I've only posted a handful. The reason for this is, they all sucked. I don't get too angry with myself if I take a bad photo that's not framed well, lacks contrast or is just plain bland photo. I do get angry with myself, however, when I screw up the camera settings when I know better. Every single time I've gone to take photos of Jade playing basketball, the exposure always turned out inconsistent. I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. I'd use manual exposure settings and even turn of auto white balance, take several photos from one spot only to have them all come out like I took each photo with different settings. I was pretty discouraged after looking at these photos I took from 2 Sundays ago.



Well, I won't go into details, but they got their butts kicked. They have 2 teams at Jade's school, an A team and a B team. The A team is for the 5th and 6th graders and the B team is for the younger classes, kind of like varsity and junior varsity. Although Jade is only in 4th grade, she is on the A team. This is because they don't have enough players in the 5th and 6th grades this year. So this year the A team has a lot of inexperienced players as well as a lack of height.



In these next photos, most of them were taken from the same spot facing the same direction all with the same exact exposure settings. I couldn't figure out why they all seemed to have different lighting. The lights weren't being turned on and off, or were they?













Jade made several shots in this game. I believe she made 50% of the points made for her team. Not that she's a ball hog or anything, lol, she was just in the right spot.

As you can see, the lighting is very inconsistent despite using the same exposure settings for each photo. Some of these photos were even taken using continuous shooting and are less than a second apart. Looking at these photos I noticed this and wondered how one part of the floor is lighter than another when the photos were taken within a second of each other. It then dawned on me that the lights were fluorescent and probably had something to do with cycles.

I then went and searched the interwebz for shooting photos in gyms and found a few articles about this. I found that fluorescent lights change color and even flicker when shooting at faster speeds like the photos I took causing these kinds of inconsistencies. So when I read that, I was all, "OH! So that's why I suck!"