Digital Sports Photography: Take Winning Shots Every Time

Chapter 6. Indoor Competition Sports

From basketball to wrestling, fencing to ice hockey, and gymnastics to martial arts, worldwide indoor sports constitute a tremendous amount of athletic sports competition and recreation from tropical to arctic climates. Professional, semiprofessional, school, and amateur sports thrive in venues where there's climate control, lights, and creature comforts to keep athletes, spectators, and others happy.

For the digital sports photographer, however, indoor competition can present some significant challenges. The lighting can be abysmal, it can be difficult to get around a crowded sports hall to get a good photo, and traipsing around on hard floors all day can be rough on even the toughest shooter's knees.

For every negative, however, sports inside a building can make for some opportunities the outdoors can't beat. Weather is never a problem, for example, and at least the lighting — even if it is bad — remains constant throughout an event in both intensity and temperature (for white-balance). Furthermore, staging your shoot, if you have extra equipment you don't want to carry, can often be stored or anchored somewhere safe.

So indoor sports of all types require you, the photographer, to adapt to the environment, both from a logistical standpoint — meaning where you position yourself and how you get your shots — to technical issues for setting your camera ...