The sun went down at around 4:30pm today but it wasn’t really dark until I stepped into Bountiful High School’s gym to shoot a basketball game tonight. The frame above is my first test frame, before I had to adjust my ISO higher than desired and my shutter speed lower than any sports photographer would go if they had a choice.

I ended up shooting at 320th of a second, which was really unfortunate. The frame above is in focus, but the action is too fast for the slow shutter speed to freeze it. And I was shooting at 3200 ISO, which really fills the frame with noise. Hey, the camera’s five years old, what can I say?

Here was the other fun thing. I’ll often shoot a frame of the scoreboard after key plays so I know what the score was at that moment. The scoreboard here was one of those kinds that has LED’s (I guess) that flash faster than the eye can see. But the camera easily notices and you end up with a blank scoreboard, even though to your eye everything is visible. To combat this I usually take three frames of the scoreboard in a fast sequence, and only if I’m really unlucky will all three be blank.

Okay, I think I’m done complaining about stuff. Here are some photographs of varying quality…

That was the other photographer shooting the game. He does a lot of Bingham games. There was a great moment when Bingham’s Nate Girsberger (4) walked into the team huddle during a timeout. He had just hit a few tough shots and as a joke, chest-bumped the coach, who was caught off guard and flew back about three or four feet. Alas, sometimes great moments like that don’t make great stills, as this sequence demonstrates…

Trust me, it was a great moment.

The Bingham starters came out of the game in the fourth quarter, holding a forty point lead over Bountiful.