Missouri forward Keith Ramsey drives to the basket against Oklahoma State on Jan. 30 at Mizzou Arena.
Back in November, I bought a set of Pocket Wizards and remote trigger cables for my cameras with the intention of diving into remote photography this basketball season. Now, more than ever, it’s crucial for professional photographers to do as much as they can to set them apart from others, and, practically speaking, remotes help accomplish this by giving the photographer more angles and options to work with. So far, I’ve only used the Pocket Wizards to access our set of strobes installed in Mizzou Arena, and occasionally for a simple floor camera remote. Now, nearly halfway through the season, I finally got my act together and acquired the two missing pieces I needed for a full-fledged remote mount; a Bogen Magic Arm and super clamp. Just to make sure I didn’t screw anything up, I asked Joel for some help in getting the remote camera clamped onto the backboard post before the game started.
For my first attempt (and I say attempt because I really had no idea what to expect) I mounted the camera as high as I could on the post, almost level with the height of the basket. I used a 12-24mm lens on a full frame body, which results in 5-megapixel crop of the total 12-megapixel sensor. Needless to say, the quality and size of the file is not optimized in this situation, but it was good enough for my purposes here. The photo above of Keith Ramsey is one of about 20 worth keeping out of 600 from my remote. A ridiculously small success rate, yes, but definitely worth the risk. I plan on trying different lenses, and different compositions up and down the backboard post in the future.
Click on for a photo slideshow from the game.
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