Great shot of Cuban. Nice slam dunk (white light/ad sign irks me, tho). Good form and clarity IMO throughout. At 2nd glance Cuban has some yellow neck on my monitor; great stuff nonetheless.
Russ, what I love about this set the action that it shows that the action does not just happen when someone is shooting a basketball. Really like the way you captureed the little things -- the game inside the game that happens when most people (photogs included) aren't watching. Love the hand fighting in the paint, the bandage on the chin, the ball slapped away in #4. Proves that there are millions of interesting shots we tend to look past every time we go shoot a game. Nice reminder. Thanks.
Russ: SWEET! I'm really liking #1 (I am a sportrait guy). I think #6 & 10 are great too! Looks like Cuban was prepped with betadine from the neck down. So I see we only brought one camera to the gig. Somebody got a new toy! So what was your first impression. Goodbye Mk IIn, it was fun while it lasted!!! Thanks for posting! Have fun with the new toy.
rrxjon: Thanks for your comments. Those flashing ads that circle the arena are a very real nuisance--agreed. Can't explain what you're seeing with Cuban. Bile? (I should add that I'm seeing it also. I've looked at some of the other images of him that I have and I think the coloring is accurate.)
Rick: As always, thanks for your detailed comments and your encouragement. This is a bit of a detail-oriented post. It's interesting to think about the fact I shoot just over 1,000 images. Cull to maybe 40 or so for a first, top-tier cut, edit and cull further to maybe 20 shots, from there pick my top 10, and only then, when looking at those final picks, might it become evident there's a theme to the shots, or maybe a single player that inadvertently worked his way into most of them, though the process involved no conscious effort to arrive at that result. In the case of this game, it was single-player, isolation shots that prevailed (beyond what I've posted), and Enes Kanter who showed up in the vast majority of what I'd culled to. Thanks for sharing your insights.
MakoShark: Cuban sure did yell a lot this night. I was surprised he never was called on it. Thanks for your feedback. My approach to cropping basketball is the same as other sports to the extent I'm trying to maximize the effectiveness of the shot. I'm sure the different sports call for different decisions. Of course much depends on what's in the original frame. With a shot like #10, my preference is to have a full-body perspective because in many instances, I feel something is lost by not actually seeing that these guys are floating in air. Similar to other sports, If I don't have feet, I typically will crop to mid thigh, I try to provide context when possible, I'm cognizant of and do my best to crop away background distractions, and since I am not adept at maintaining level horizons while shooting, I do a lot of straightening (which for me usually is connected to my cropping). Hope that's the kind of info. you were after.
Ben: Haha! You got me. I had two cameras, but clearly my focus was on the 1Dx. First impression is shock and awe. No kidding. It's a sleek, smooth, fast and accurate machine with just enough differences from what I'm used to that I was doing a lot of last-minute scrambling trying to get even basic settings to where I wanted them (like how the focus points light up, the order of movement through them while selecting a point, back-button focus, etc.). I also was very surprised to find out, during my pregame edits, that ACR in PS5 won't open the 1Dx RAW files. Gasp! Had to go with jpgs, and I was less then confident about that. Looking at the images, I know I'm not quite dialed in for this arena, but I think I'm only a few short tweaks away. So yeah, damn impressive, and worth the grief I caused for myself by using it an event when I hadn't yet shot a single frame with it. And I think you also are right about the MKIIN. I probably will be handing this off to my daughter as her first digital SLR. Thanks for your comments!
Thanks, Richard! Still not as eye-popping as what you regularly put out there, so I'll keep at it.
What version? Has to be 7.1 to open 1dx RAW files. At the event, I updated ACR with no luck. Bought and installed PS6 and still no luck opening the 1Dx RAW files, until I downloaded the ACR update. I could be wrong, in which case I spent money I didn't need to spend, but I don't think the latest version of ACR can be loaded into the previous version (CS5) of photoshop.
So I guess the camera is a keeper . Nice timing on these and mix of action, emotion, faces and body art. I'm looking forward to basketball and wrestling to see what it can do.
