Introduction

First off, DON'T BE INTIMIDATED! You don’t need a professional camera. And you don’t need to be a Photoshop expert. I’ll try to stick to non-technical terms. So don’t be intimidated by the length of the page. Jjump right in! Hopefully, after cruising through these recommendations, you’ll be inspired to experiment.

What Makes It Hard?

There are several things that make shooting volleyball difficult. First, is the need to shoot indoors without a flash. It would be very distracting to the players (and fans) if you used a flash. So you need to shoot without it. But it is difficult to shoot fast enough to stop the action without a flash.

Second, is actually taking the picture at the instant that you want to. Most cameras have a pretty significant lag between when you squeeze the shutter and when the camera actually takes the picture.

Composing the shot, getting a good subject, is my third item on this list of difficulties. How to you get the shot of the right action?

Recommended Equipment

Digital vs. Film? My first recommendation is to shoot digital. The right film can actually do a better job in low light. But digital has the huge advantage of being able to take a hundred shots to get 20 good photos, with basically no cost.

What kind of camera will work? For the last several years I used a point and shoot-style Olympus; a 2 megapixel C2020. And I got some very fine shots with it. There are two important capabilities that you’ll need.

First you’ll want a camera with a lens that lets in a lot of light. The light-gathering capability of a lens is listed using “F” followed by a number. The smaller the number, the more light gets in. A lens that zooms will have an F number at wide angle and a bigger number at zoom. For a point and shoot-style camera, you’ll want a lens that can shoot as low as F2.8.

You also need a camera with the ability to shoot in a manual mode where you set the shutter speed. To get the most light possible and still freeze the action, you will want to set the shutter speed at 1/80 of a second or faster. Using manual mode, you can set this and forget it, and let the camera change how much light it lets in to set the exposure.

How many megapixels? My Olympus only had 2 megapixels, and I got by. But more megapixels gives you a lot more flexibility when editing the pictures. You can “zoom in” more, cropping the picture. This means that you can also shoot with the lens zoomed out to wide angle and crop it close later. Cropping flexibility also allows you do a better job at getting the best final composition for your photo after you edit. But there are downsides to lots of megs. More megapixels means fewer pictures fit on a memory card. And it means it will take longer to transfer the photos from the camera. My recommendation would be for a camera with at least 3 megapixels. But if the tradeoff is that a camera with more megapixels versus one with a faster lens, I’d go with the camera with the faster lens.

Finally, here’s a quick hit list of some other equipment items that will make your photos better. Get a big memory card. The more space you’ve got, the more shots you can take at the match. You don’t want to have to think about budgeting your shots. You want to be able to shoot a ton of shots. Invest in a monopod. A one-legged tripod, a monopod helps steady your shots (which is what makes 1/80 second shot work), helps you aim without working hard, and it prevents fatigue. Make sure you have good batteries. High capacity batteries can be bought on-line, and I highly recommend Thomas Distributing.

Software: You’ll Want To Edit

You will need some type of software on your computer for editing your photos. As a minimum, you’ll want to crop and adjust the brightness, contrast and color. There will be software that comes with your camera. But I’m going to recommend what I believe is the best inexpensive photo editing program: Adobe Photoshop Elements. This program has an amazing amount of capability, and it is geared toward the consumer. It comes packages with many cameras and scanners. And if you need to buy it, you can look for academic pricing, which you can do since you have at least one student… who happens to play volleyball!

Shooting Technique

Camera settings. There is one setting that I haven’t talked about yet. The technical term is ISO, and back in the film days, it was a measure of how “fast” the film was. Double the ISO number and you can double the shutter speed at the same exposure. The tradeoff is that higher numbers resulting a more “grainy” picture; more “noisy”. Set this as high as your camera will let you. Point and shoot digital cameras can typically shoot ISO 400.

I’ve mentioned the next point already. Shutter speed. Fix the shutter speed so that it is fast enough to freeze the shot. Let the camera adjust the aperture (the amount of lens opening) to set the exposure. A speed of 1/80th of a second will work. I am shooting at 1/100th at a minimum. I'd really like to shoot no slower than 1/125. In a dark gym, you will maybe not even be able to shoot at 1/80th and get a proper exposure. In these cases, I’ll still shoot at 1/80th and let the camera underexpose. Then I’ll try to correct the exposure later with my editing program. If this still doesn’t work, well, the gym is just too dark to allow you to get any good shots. A serious bummer.

Now lets talk about actually taking the shot. As I mentioned in the introduction, most cameras, and all point and shoot cameras, have a serious lag between when you press the button and when the camera takes the picture. The reason is that the camera has to focus and set it’s exposure, and it waits until you pull the trigger to do it. This makes getting the shot at the right time danged near impossible. But there is a technique that works to make this problem all but go away. For most all cameras, you can "pre-squeeze" the shutter halfway and the camera will do its exposure adjustment and focus. Hold it there, and then push it the rest of the way at the “right time” and you’ll get an instant shot. So what I do is this: Before a serve, I aim at a target player (maybe just one on the middle of the court) and half-squeeze the shutter. Then I follow the action and "complete" the shot basically instantaneously by pressing the shutter the rest of the way down.

So there’s how to get a shot at the right time. But how do you set the RIGHT shot and the right time? There are two key concepts; Anticipation and Volume. Anticipation of the play is really key. I'm watching the game and I see where the ball is going... then I anticipate whether there might be a block or a dig or a kill. This is where the monopod helps. I can keep the camera aimed in the right direction while keeping my head up and seeing the game as a whole. As I watch the point progress, I try to figure out where the best shot will come. Often times I guess wrong, and the best action occurs somewhere else on the court. Don’t just try to get the moment of contact. Get the moment just BEFORE contact when the player is hanging in the air. When I’m shooting for the web page, I try to make sure to get all of the team members, plus a few team shots. Try all kinds of stuff!

This leads into the second key concept, Volume. Volume means taking lots of pictures! I shoot a TON of shots. With my old camera, I would shoot around 100 or so for a full day tournament. Now I’m shooting twice that many! Most will be junk. When I first started, about 1 in 7 were worth working on with the editor. I’ve gotten better; now it’s more like 1 in 3.

File Management

Finally, a simple recommendation. I keep the originals as they come out of the camera in an unedited state, and I crop and edit only on copies. This way I can always start over if I really mess up an edit.

Good luck! And when you get good shots from your games, let me know and we'll get them up on the web site!