To fill in some of the blanks on how we light the Delta Center for NBA basketball, here we go… When we started to look into lighting the arena, we did research from a bunch of sites, including SportsShooter.Com and the now defunct ArenaStrobes.Com, which was run by Tennessee photographer Patrick Murphy-Racey.
On the one hand, all the top professionals were running on the Sports Illustrated model, which calls for four Speedotron heads costing around $25,000. Murphy-Racey’s site was claiming success for years in pro arenas with Elinchrom lights that cost one-fifth of that.
Who to believe?
One of the factors we had to consider is the height of the ceiling at the Delta Center. It’s a very high catwalk, where our lights would be mounted. And the further the lights are from the subject, the dimmer the light. We would need power. Murphy-Racey told us that he worked with a high ceiling as well and assured us we wouldn’t have any problems, especially with Elinchrom’s giant beehive-shaped reflectors. We decided to go with the Elinchrom lights.
I talked to Kent Horner, who was then the Jazz team photographer. Horner had spent years working as a lighting technician for Sports Illustrated and had installed lights in arenas all over the country. Horner knew this stuff as well as anyone I knew. He looked over our plan and was, to say the least, skeptical.
He pointed out that each of his four Speedotron heads were putting out 2400 watt seconds of power. Our Elinchrom heads would only be putting out 600 watt seconds. It just didn’t make sense to think that they would have the power to light the arena. Simple math, 600 is less than 2400.
Still, Horner agreed to help us install the lights. Before I tell you how it turned out I’ll describe our basic setup, which matches what just about everyone else is using in these situations. We’ve got four heads (basically large studio-type flash heads), one in each corner just to the side of each basket on the court. (Put it behind the basket and you get shadows from the backboard.) Attached to these heads are wireless receivers, which trigger the lights when we take a shot. (Attached to our cameras are corresponding wireless transmitters.)
Photographers will often also use remote cameras for basketball, which are also triggered wirelessly. Often a release button for the remote camera will be taped to the photographer’s main camera. It takes practice, but after a while you’re pushing one button or the other, or both depending on the play. I’ll talk more about that in another post.
High end systems are used by outlets like Sports Illustrated, which link multiple cameras and lighting systems to each other. For example, a typically SI setup will have several remote-controlled cameras that are locked into focus and pointed at the basket, the bench, or whatever. They’ll also often mount a camera in the ceiling, pointing straight down at the rim, or a camera looking at the rim through the glass backboard. These cameras are all synchronized on a wireless remote system so that when the photographer pushes the shutter button to take a shot, every camera (and the strobes) fire at the same moment. So one photographer during one play can get several angles of it at once. That’s the high end and not many people are shooting at that level. It’s mostly a cost issue, when you consider that each camera body alone is costing between $3,000 to $8,000, not counting lenses, wireless systems, and lights.
Back to our system, admittedly low-end. Would it work, would our four weak heads light up the enormous Delta Center? Kent and I spent a day hooking up the equipment. Once we had everything plugged in, we eyeballed the difference in brightness between his Speedotrons and our Elinchroms. When he set off the powerful Speedotrons, there was an audible POP! when the lights fired. When he set off ours, they was noticeable dimmer and there was no exciting pop. Very anti-climactic. We climbed down to the floor to make some test shots and find out the answer. Going through my head were all the conflicting takes on the setup. I wasn’t sure that our lights were going to be strong enough. But I hadn’t completely lost hope. We put the wireless transmitter on a camera and I took a frame of Kent:
It worked. (I should note that test shot is with only two of the four strobes firing.)
Someone asked in a comment if we ever put up lights for high school games. The answer is basically: no. The amount of time it would take to set up and then take down lights in a high school gym, added to the fact that we just don’t have the equipment to do it, make it impossible. The other thing to consider is the quality we’re getting from our cameras. With every new pro camera that comes out, the quality in low light situations gets better and better. And as the images get better and better, the need for lights goes down. As for high school, there are some truly dark gyms out there. We know which ones they are, these dark and awful caves. Even some of the newest high schools have horribly dim gyms.
If you’re shooting basketball in a bad gym, you need a lens with at least a 2.8 aperture. You’d be better off with a faster lens. I would recommend an 85/1.8 lens for basketball in a dark gym. We pretty much shoot it all with a 70-200/2.8 lens and a 300/2.8 or 400/2.8 for the far end. We try to keep our shutter speeds at 1/500th of a second or faster. 1/500 at f2.8 is the standard setting for indoor sports. Luckily for high school sports, the playoffs and championship games are usually held in college arenas, which have bright lights.
This post also appeard on my work blog, on the Tribune’s website.
