3 ms·

>...how to shoot volleyball which is so much harder than shooting soccer than you’d believe. How/ why? I can only imagine size of game-playing area..

PaulHoule 3y ago
(1) It is played indoors, there is not a lot of light. The environment can be visually cluttered. To make matters worse, at my Uni the arena (where they also play basketball) has bright LED video signs that cause the scene to be backlit. (The college on the other hill though has a much better arena from my point of view, I can even sit on the floor in front of the bleachers which is a great angle though I know if I do it long enough I'll get hit by the ball.) Some consequences are: high ISO shooting with a lot of noise which means you can’t shoot wide and crop it without noise being terrible (maybe you have two players in the frame), Open aperture means your focus has to be precise but it can be a challenging environment for autofocus. I have a 90mm which takes lovely pictures and does pretty good in low light but when the autofocus resets it takes two seconds and I certainly can’t focus faster than that myself. You will be using a prime lens instead of a zoom lens because of the low light which means you can’t just set the focal length to what is convenient for you. (2) In soccer or field hockey you can just follow the ball and shoot bursts and get some dramatic shots. A player might be dribbling for several seconds. American football is a little tougher because of the stop and start nature: a good shot of a passing play means anticipating and planning ahead. In volleyball though contact with the ball is so quick that you can’t at all see something and shoot it, you have to be set up ahead of time, be focused ahead of time (I used the auto focus lock for the first time), be looking at the viewfinder and looking at the ball at the same time, etc. Fortunately the action is a volleyball game is highly structured, the players are work together in a certain way so if you stick to a player you will actually take the same shot over and over. I’ve challenged myself to shoot a game of every sport my Uni has a varsity team of and so far volleyball is the first one where I walked away from a game without any good shots, I went and asked at dpreview for help and went back and got much better results.

PaulHoule 3y ago

(1) It is played indoors, there is not a lot of light. The environment can be visually cluttered. To make matters worse, at my Uni the arena (where they also play basketball) has bright LED video signs that cause the scene to be backlit. (The college on the other hill though has a much better arena from my point of view, I can even sit on the floor in front of the bleachers which is a great angle though I know if I do it long enough I'll get hit by the ball.) Some consequences are: high ISO shooting with a lot of noise which means you can’t shoot wide and crop it without noise being terrible (maybe you have two players in the frame), Open aperture means your focus has to be precise but it can be a challenging environment for autofocus. I have a 90mm which takes lovely pictures and does pretty good in low light but when the autofocus resets it takes two seconds and I certainly can’t focus faster than that myself. You will be using a prime lens instead of a zoom lens because of the low light which means you can’t just set the focal length to what is convenient for you. (2) In soccer or field hockey you can just follow the ball and shoot bursts and get some dramatic shots. A player might be dribbling for several seconds. American football is a little tougher because of the stop and start nature: a good shot of a passing play means anticipating and planning ahead. In volleyball though contact with the ball is so quick that you can’t at all see something and shoot it, you have to be set up ahead of time, be focused ahead of time (I used the auto focus lock for the first time), be looking at the viewfinder and looking at the ball at the same time, etc. Fortunately the action is a volleyball game is highly structured, the players are work together in a certain way so if you stick to a player you will actually take the same shot over and over. I’ve challenged myself to shoot a game of every sport my Uni has a varsity team of and so far volleyball is the first one where I walked away from a game without any good shots, I went and asked at dpreview for help and went back and got much better results.