Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/01/06

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Subject: RE: [Leica] Available PAW
From: Dave Jenkins <djphoto@vol.com>
Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2002 14:42:09 -0500

Colin wrote:

I only just started photographing the basketball games this season; I'm
not very
good at it!  I've been using my Canon with the autofocus and the nice
zoom lenses.  I may try doing a little with the Leica once I get my
confidence up.  It's not easy, even with full auto!  For what it's
worth, tho, even with the EOS-1 I metered once and left it there in
manual mode.  It's quite dark in the gym - I was doing around 1/200th
@1250 ISO and f/2.8.  I get tons of blurry shots.
________________________________________________________

I've done quite a bit of this, since my oldest son was a basketball
player and he subsequently coached college basketball for about ten
years.

I don't try to follow focus or use auto focus. Some are skillful enough
to do this, but I'm not one of them. However, I do get good shots. Since
most of the action takes place under/around the basket, I usually sit on
the floor at the endline about 15 feet to one side of the goal,
depending on which side the referee is working. I take an incident
reading and set my exposure for the light on the key (free-throw lane,
to you non basketballers), focus on the net, and fire away with a 35mm
or 28mm lens whenever I see action I like. Depth of field at that
distance with a wide lens at f2.8 is sufficient to cover most
situations. A Leica is ideal because one can actually watch the action
both inside and outside the frame lines and release the shutter (with
infinitesimally brief lag time) at exactly the right instant.

Dave Jenkins

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