A Baseball Classic: Abott & Costello’s Who’s on First
As in previous years, I have opted to take it easy this summer in order to stay fresh and maintain my perspective for the upcoming 2008 – 2009 high school and college sports season. However, I was recently talking with someone who has never seen one of the true classic baseball skits by Abbott and Costello. We found the clip on YouTube so I have to share it with you. No matter how many times I have seen this skit, it still cracks me up. I hope it does the same for you.
Shooting Sports Indoors
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:
