Last night was my first time to shoot basketball. That sounds weird. I cannot believe that I had never shot basketball until last night. Although basketball is not one of my favorite sports, shooting it is pretty darn exciting. I was scheduled to shoot a prep football playoff and was elated to find out I was switching to an arena with lighting instead of a very dark high school football stadium. Since I don’t have much experience with arena strobes and my basketball shooting experience being where it was, I decided to head out to the base early, which proved to be a very good idea. It was the first game of the 2007 season for the US Air Force Academy Falcons and they faced off against the Big Green of Dartmouth. The venue was Clune Arena on the base of the Academy and as soon as I arrived I headed up to the catwalk to turn on the paper’s strobes. (4 Elichrom 1000r’s) After my initial (frightening) walk through, I checked the lines and much to my dismay found that the drop line to attach the pocket wizards to the strobes wasn’t working properly. After checking the lines and connections over and over I finally dropped into one of the strobes and managed to get half of the court’s lights operational. I would have to deal with that. Prior to the start of the game, the AFA photographer and I realized that we were crossing channels which was very odd since he was using a digital frequency and I was on analog. In the end, I was forced to shoot with the south-end lights on only leaving the back court completely black. It wasn’t an ideal situation, however it simplified some of the images. At some points, since the other photographer and I were sharing one of the strobes, if he had fired before me, I would only have one light operational as the shared strobe would be recycling. Needless to say there was a motley crue of images; some available light, some lit with one strobe, some lit with two. It was actually a lot more exciting than I would have thought, given the proximity to action. I did shoot from the catwalk for a bit, but with the sketchy lighting, it was better from the floor. I’m kind of bummed that I’m just now getting to shoot basketball, but I’m glad that its the NCAA. I hope to shoot a lot more soon.