Yuval's Photography

Before we had our new DSLR, Vered shot one of my games using our Olympus C-5060 5.1 MP Digital Camera w/4x Optical Zoom point&shoot. Her heroic attempts and great results despite the slowness of that camera are available here on flickr.

I was looking for a good opportunity to shoot with our new camera. Last saturday, after my own volleyball practice, I stayed to take some photos of a game in the national league between another team from my club (KKTA) and Beer Sheva.

I took our Nikon D80 DSLR, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens, and a Nikon 50mm f/1.8D AF Nikkor we had on loan from a friend.

I took the pictures from the stands, and focused mainly on net action (as I'm mostly a net player, naturally its my main interest... but its also easier to anticipate) and serves. The challenge mentioned by anyone who tried to shoot volleyball or other indoor sports in gyms is that the lighting is not that great (to say the least). You want to have as fast a lens as possible. While my Nikon 18-200mm VR lens is great for most conditions, its VR capability doesn't help when you want to shoot action, and since its not that fast, you are left with a shutter speed that is not fast enough to fully freeze the action and provide a sharp image. The only thing to do is to go to a very high ISO (1600 in this case) and hope for some keepers if you do manage to capture a moment which is fairly static (like the fraction of time before someone spikes where he reaches the epoch of his jump). Another way is to shoot with lower focal lengths where the aperture is faster (but still towards the 3.6-4 range, not nearly enough).

I then switched to the Nikon 50mm f/1.8D AF Nikkor. Here its a different story. Its a very fast lens, and you can shoot at 1.8 aperture and really freeze the action. I stayed with ISO 1600, and even played with higher ISOs for some shots to see the ramifications. The challenge with this lens is that composing is a real challenge since you are quite far away from the action, at least when shooting from the stands. I read great stuff about the Nikon 85mm f/1.8D AF Nikkor for sports as well as general low-light photography and especially portraiture. Its more expensive than the 50mm but might be worth it considering my photography subjects.

Another challenge was timing of the shots. The D80 has a frame rate of about 3fps which is good but not really pro-level. This means that even if you go to continuous shooting mode you need to time your sequence and hope for some luck. Getting the actual fraction of a second where the action happens proved to be very hard.
In addition I switched to JPEG mode (I usually shoot in RAW) to allow for faster and longer continuous shooting.

Anyhow, this has been a very interesting photography experience, which I intend to repeat. The guys from the team liked the pictures from what I've heard so far ;)