My first volleyball match of the year

Canon Mark IIN, 300mm, ISO 100, 1/250, f7

Volleyball season started on August 28, 2009 for Wake Forest, but they did not have me shoot any matches until the October 30, 2009 match versus Maryland, which was also the annual "Dig for the Cure" night, where money is raised based upon the number of digs made by the Wake Forest Demon Deacons.

My life would be so much easier if the volleyball team played their matches at the Lawrence Joel Coliseum like the basketball team.  At "The Joel" there are strobe lights already installed in the catwalk area that I use when shooting men's and women's basketball.  Instead they play in the Reynolds Gymnasium on campus, which is very small and not very well lit (at least not until I can afford to buy one of the new Canon EOS 1D Mark IV bodies so I can shoot at ISO 3200 without it looking super grainy).  So, for as long as I have been shooting volleyball at Wake Forest I have been setting up 2 White Lightning strobes above the court in areas where the teams also setup their video cameras to record the matches (see below):

I had brought with me 2 of my White Lightning X3200 strobes along with 11" reflectors.  As you can see I try to aim them at the court in such a way as to light the court but not the stands.  It's days like these that I wish I had an assistant to help with positioning the lights, instead of going up 1 floor and then having to climb up very tight staircases to get to where I have the lights.  In the past I have also tried bouncing the lights off the white ceiling, and while that did work well enough it also lit up the stands, and I just prefer them to be darker so that the players on the court stand out more from the background.  Here is what the light looks like when I am facing the court:

In hindsight I should have dialed the strobes down a bit more than I had (they were already set at -1 stop) since I was getting f7 at ISO 100 at the net, and I really don't need to be shooting at f7.  Dialing down the strobes would have also given me a faster recycle time.  The X3200's take 4 seconds to recycle at full power, and at -1 they were taking 3 seconds.  So, next time I will try setting them at -2 and see what kind of output I get from them.

The other issue I have been dealing with for years is that the end of the court where I have my strobes is also the end of the court that Wake Forest starts play in, which means if it is a short 3-set match, their backs are to the light for 2 of the 3 sets.   As you can see in the photo above there is not a similar location up high to place strobes, and add to that fact that there is no power at the opposite end of the gym.  This year I went and purchased one of the portable battery units from White Lightning to try and power at least 1 strobe in the corner, but silly me forgot to charge it the night before.  I did see a power outlet about halfway up the wall and the scoreboard was plugged into it.  I found the guy from operations and asked him if I could plug in there, but was told there were no ladders around to get me up there.  He did point out there was an outlet on the wall behind one of the bleachers (which I had never noticed before) and he let me run my 100' extension cord from there to the corner.  Here I setup a White Lighting X2400 srobe with a 7" reflector, and since I was not nearly as high up as the other end of the court, I decided to bounce the light rather than risk the players complaining that the strobe was going off directly into their eyes. 

At least now I could shoot from that side of the court towards the net and have the players faces lit instead of just the backlight from the X3200's behind them.  So, now that I had the strobes set up (after 5-6 trips to the car for lights, stands, extension cords, batteries, Pocket Wizards, etc.) I was ready to start shooting the action.  In my 9 years shooting for Wake Forest I have to say that volleyball has been the most challenging sport for me to capture the action, but it has also become one of my favorites, because when you are able to following the action you can make some powerful images.

Mark IIN, 16mm, ISO 200, 1/250, f7

Since this was my first (and possibly only) match of the year I not only wanted to get images of as many different players as possible, but also the coaching staff.  Here head coach Heather Kahl-Holmes gives the team final instructions prior to the start of the match.  This was kind of a "Hail Mary" shot, where I held the camera up and just fired off a couple of shots (waiting 3 seconds between shots for the strobes to recycle - more on that in a bit) and although the lighting is not as even as I would like (because the left side of the team is close to the bleachers the light is falling off there, which is what I want for the match, but it just left them a little "in the dark").

Mark IIN, 90mm, ISO 200, 1/250, f5.6

The first set I didn't get anything spectacular as I was just mainly concentrating on getting individual photos of as many players as possible.  The second set I moved to the side of the court where I had the X2400 strobe bouncing off the wall.  One of the easiest players to photograph is the setter, as she will almost always touch the ball, and she turns sideways to face me while setting the ball.

Canon EOS 1D, 73mm, ISO 800, 1/500, f2.8

As I mentioned earlier volleyball has been the most challenging sport for me to photograph.  The very first time I shot a match I was trying to follow the ball as I would at a basketball game, but the speed at which the ball travels makes it nearly impossible to shoot that way.  So what works for me is watching one player and waiting for the action to come to them.  Even then it is still difficult to always catch the ball in frame.  I was very happy with the above photo because it fit the "Dig for the Cure" theme not only because the player was making a dig, but you can also see the fans wearing their pink t-shirts in support of finding a cure for breast cancer.  One other thing I should mention that I did with the strobes is that I set the Multi-Max units for the 2 lights up high on channel A, and the single light on channel B, this way I could control which lights would fire when I pressed the shutter button.  For the photo above I only fired the single light, and since the light is bounced it is not as strong, so I had to bump the ISO to 800 and drop the aperature to f2.8.

Finally I find myself too often becoming locked in on shooting the action as tight as possible, and forget to capture images that set the scene.  In the past I have not been able to capture the image below because I did not have the light on the opposite end of the gym, but on this night I was able to turn off the back lights and just use the single front light and pull back on the zoom to include the scoreboard in the background as the player was serving the ball:

Canon EOS 1D, 73mm, ISO 800, 1/500, f2.8