Commack High School Boys Varsity Basketball vs Brentwood - AA Finals
This game didn’t end the way Commack would have liked but they had a solid season and it was a lot of fun photographing them.
When high school teams play in college venues I like to shoot a lot wider than usual. This allows me to get more of the arena in the image and gives people a sense of where they were. Island Federal Arena is a decent sized space. If you’re shooting for a newspaper running black and white photos you’ll be very satisfied with the amount of light. The only downside is that players at center court are a little flat because the light is hitting them from all angles but this is easily remedied.
If you’re shooting color, well, you have issues. In addition to those nice bright lights in the ceiling you have a bunch of large, very bright LED displays that can easily overpower the ceiling lights and bathe the players in whatever ghastly colors they happen to be projecting at the moment. This is not correctable with white balance; you need to mask the affected players and color correct as needed. This makes for a long day. You could, of course, just go with the flow and let the colors fall where they will, but this makes for some very bizarre looking color casts. Oh, and the fact that the seats and most everything else are bright red doesn’t help. I was only marginally successful in restoring some semblence of semi-realistic colors, but hey, it was good practice.
Well, that’s it for the winter sports season. See you in March.
