Shooting Friday morning basketball in Satwa

Just next to Satwa park are two public basketball courts and a tennis court, seemingly always in use, the former exclusively by Filipino men.  I'm not much interested in basketball, but I'm always interested in taking photos of something different and meeting new people, so I made my way there yesterday morning for a couple of hours of shooting.

I learned that the facilities are locked over night and open at 08:00.  I'm not sure how teams are sorted.  The men I spoke to said these are pick-up games, so perhaps individuals get sorted into teams on site.  It could also be that a group of friends play together regularly, as was suggested about the Japanese guys that sometimes play with the otherwise all-Filipino crowd.  I noted one man had a list of players sorted into teams and ranked by their order of play.  I got conflicting answers from different informants about the exact number, but it seems there is an upper limit to scoring and once that number is reached, teams are rotated.

No one challenged my presence on the court apart from one man asking what magazine I worked for, and another curious about what I would do with my photos.  I told them both this is a personal hobby and that images would appear on my Flickr account.  As is usually the case with Filipinos, the individuals I spoke with were friendly, open, and welcoming.  

What I learned about shooting basketball:

A lot of it can be shot in vertical as much of the action is jumping.  Shooting in landscape often leaves excess empty space. 

There seem to be two basic approaches:  be mobile and follow the action, or pick a spot to frame your image and wait for the action to come to you.  The latter is advantageous in that you need fix your settings only once.  Moving around may require more adjustment.  The disadvantage is that you may have to wait some while for a suitable placement of elements to move through your frame.  

I've learned it before, but failed to apply it:  think through your shoot before you shoot.  I missed out on a number of images because I didn't set the focusing system to subject tracking.

Shooting outdoors requires frequent changes to settings depending on whether your subject is in the sun, in the shade, or moving across both.  The best way I've found to deal with this is to set the shade settings in P mode, the sunlit settings in S mode, and then toggle between.  

I was on court approximately one hour resulting in:

• 351 images shot
• 71 images selected
• 32 images processed and exported
• 11 images for a Flickr album

#