Jedburgh Badminton Club, best for Badminton in the Scottish Borders

WWW.JEDBURGHBADMINTONCLUB.ORG.UK - THE BORDERS PREMIER BADMINTON CLUB

Notes for photographers:

For action photography, light levels at the Bells centre are poor to say the least. I had to shoot at 6400ASA at maximum aperture or close to it most of the time and this is where L lenses come into their own. Cheaper lenses dont perform as well at maximum apertures. Shutter speeds were slower than preferred and with shallow depth of field - not ideal. I set manual on the camera and purposely under exposed many shots to squeeze a faster shutter speed or half a stop more aperture then simply pulled the images in photoshop.

Many of the images taken head on from across the other side of the net were taken high up from the gallery at the opposite end of court from the player being photographed. The images were cropped and consist of only 25% to 35% of the frame resulting in a grainy photo through enlargement and not simply from using 6400asa.


A crop from the image on the right, adjusted in photoshop and we have a usable image for the web.	Intentionally taken at least one stop under exposed from high up in the gallery to give a faster shutter speed/aperture combination, Canon 70-200mm F 2.8 L IS USM and monopod.
	Settings can be seen on the left. without 6400 asa, and under exposing at leas tone stop, photos depicting or freezing action would have been very difficult to capture indeed.

6400 asa on the Canon 1D MK111 is very usable in better light, check out the YONEX International gallery photographed at Kelvin hall. Referring back to the head on photos across the net, for this type of shot I had to use the 70-200mm F2.8 L IS USM (with a monopod) for the fast aperture but a 300mm F 2.8 would have been ideal but that's big bucks. Court side action shots were taken with a Canon 24-105 F4 L . It's big brother the 24-70 F2.8 L would have been better still.

These are low resolution images, the hi-res equivalents are better. White balance has not been adjusted on all photographs.

Summary. At the end of the day to get 'action' photos in these conditions was not easy. Static shots as the players were about to serve - no problem, but we see tons of these. Shallow depth of field was as big an issue as were slow shutter speeds and in doubles, it was almost impossible to get two players in focus in the same shot.

It's easy to get hung about grain (noise in digital) and white balance and other technical issues but if you end up with usable images that illustrate the event - job done.