It's difficult to capture action shots in poorly lit gymnasiums.  Yesterday, I had to boost my camera's ISO setting to ISO 6400 in order to achieve a fast enough shutter speed (1/800th) to stop the action--even with my lens wide open.

When I first started taking pictures, I almost always used Kodachrome ASA 25 slide film. Sometimes, I would go with the higher speed ASA 400 film for night pictures. When desperate, I would try ASA 800--knowing that the quality was going to suffer severely.

As a perspective, the ISO 6400 setting that I used to take photos of my niece's volleyball match yesterday is 16 times more sensitive to light than the "fast" ASA 800 film that I used years ago. And, I would argue that the image quality of these ISO 6400 pictures exceeds that of the ASA 800 slide film.

Even so, I tend to convert images captured in low light conditions to black and white. Black and white removes all the crazy color casts from the gymnasium's lighting and also helps make the noise/grain appear more natural in my view.

I plan to return to this location on Tuesday with my Einstein strobes. This will raise the level of ambient light--allowing me to lower the ISO setting. Hopefully, supplementing the ambient light with strobes will result in higher image quality and more natural colors.

It takes practice to be able to capture good images consistently.  In many ways, the camera is just like a musical instrument.  It's best to practice daily.  Ongoing practice makes working the settings seem automatic so that you can concentrate on the subject in front of the lens.

Since returning from Florida two weeks ago, I've only shot a handful of pictures. And, it's been several months since I shot a sporting event.

Yesterday, I decided to practice my photography by shooting my nephew's recreational basketball game.  During the first half of the game, I had very few keepers.  The camera's auto-focus was having trouble locking onto the subject and I was getting very soft images.  I blamed it on the low light in the gym (ISO 1600, 1/1000, f/2.8)--even though I've shot in far worse lighting conditions in the past.

During halftime, I reviewed all of the settings on my camera and lenses and discovered that I had made a ridiculous mistake.  I had the camera set to single rather than continuous servo auto-focus!  As a result, the focus was not tracking any moving subjects at all.

After making the adjustment to continuous focus tracking, the majority of the remaining images were sharp.  I finished the session with this image:

The bottom line is that it's not only important to keep practicing, but it's also important to practice the different types of photography on an ongoing basis.