Few days ago I posted a picture of a Finnish Basketball player Dionne Pounds and that received lots of comments via Email and Facebook, so here is a little Blog entry explaining more about taking of the image and few similar images to show.

Photographing a sports team practice session is not the most exciting thing, sometimes you are only given 10 minutes to shoot the images at the end of training, when not much is happening. But it isn't so much the time restraint that you battle against, it is also trying to come up with something interesting or eye capturing from a session where players aren't doing too much.

The training session in Latina, Italy few weeks ago was pretty normal late training session - the team had had a long day of traveling and were just stretching their legs. I kept walking around the gym looking for angles, high and low to see what would work from it - when i noticed the setting sun coming through a small gap in the curtains and hitting the court in an angle. With natural light you don't have much time to get it 'right' - so it was a rush to get to a good angle, then hoping that the players ran through the beam of the sun so I would capture them half in the light and half in the shade, which would create the nice contrast in the images. With no sun hitting the background, I exposed on the sun to get that part of the image correctly exposed and leaving the background dark.

As you can imagine trying to capture things 'just right' wasn't too easy, players were either avoiding the sunny spot or when they came to it they closed/squinted their eyes so that they looked less like athletes and more like ???? - but, few frames captured things the way that made the player look good and the lighting pretty close to the way I wanted it to. In total I had about 3 minutes to take pictures while the sun was shining to the court - which honestly was than I was expecting to have.

In the post processing stage - I converted the images to Black & White. darkened the shadows a little bit and 'rescued' some of the blown-out bits of the images and that was about it.

Of course this same type of lighting effect can be replicated with strobes, continuous lighting - but to use only natural light, you give yourself a bigger challenge as you battle against the natural elements, players avoiding the sun... and if you manage to capture like this, it feel more rewarding to me than if I would have been able to control the lighting and have three hours to get the images I wanted instead of three minutes.

Personally the image that I feel captured the lighting and mood best is the one of Pounds where she looks at the 'floating ball' - I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the set and what image caught your eye the most??

The pictures feature Finnish Women's National team players Dionne Pounds, Heta Korpivaara, Taru Tuukkanen, Tiina Sten and Vilma Kesanen.

You can also visit the Image Gallery (of the slide show) to view the image in bigger format!!