As the indoor sports season approaches, I thought I would opine on how to simulate arena lighting inside typically dark high school venues. Many people take their fancy DSLR cameras to basketball and ice hockey games thinking they will get great images of their favorite athlete, but all they get are blurry images full of digital noise similar to grain we used to get when we were shooting mostly film. You can spend a lot of money on the fastest lenses and the fanciest camera bodies, but your images still will not come close to rivalling those shot with some artifical light. Save your money. You do not need that 200/2.0 lens. What you need are some strobes.

My suggestions are applicable to basketball, wrestling, track, ice hockey, swimming and other indoor events in dark locations. I will talk about my strategy using Dynalite strobes and packs, but they are certainly applicable if you plan to use monolights from White Lightning, Dynalite, Speedotron, Elinchrom, Profoto and others as well as camera flash units with sync such as the QFlash, SB-800 or 580-EXII. Done right, you can capture images like those below.

If you want to know how it’s done, continue to the rest of the article:

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