Rock Steady and Rapid Fire!

Back in my days as the photographer for the Albany Patroons, I would attempt to “stitch” together action photographs of the Pats in dunking mode. The idea was to get the player as he’s going to the hoop, shot by shot, stitch by stitch.

Unfortunately, I had several things working against me back then. One was that at the time, I was shooting without a tripod. This meant that because the camera was in my hands during the action photo, I couldn’t guarantee that the picture would stay “rock-solid still” in time for stitching later. The second issue was that my stacking program was my old Corel PhotoPaint 9 software. Yeah, ancient tech. And the third problem was I was trying to capture action photos while using my old Nikon D70, and other photographers with Nikon D3’s and Nikon D300’s were just passing me by, photo-wise.  And the fourth problem was that I was counting on guys like Kwan Johnson to dunk.  This was the same Kwan Johnson whose knees gave out two years before his career did.

Yesterday was the skills competition events for the National Basketball League of Canada’s All-Star Weekend.  I love All-Star weekend – it’s the fifth minor league all-star matchup for me, and it’s my first for NBL-C.  And during the Slam Dunk competition, I wanted to get a super-slam dunk and get it done right.  And get it in a way that was more effective than my previous attempts.

First off, here’s the winning dunk from Jamar Abrams of the London Lightning.

It’s a great dunk.  Heck, it won the competition.  But honestly, from this picture it just looks like any old dunk in any old basketball game.

But what if I told you that in order to get THIS shot…

I had to set my Nikon D700 on a rock-solid tripod…

And I used my new Vivitar 19mm f/3.8 ultra-wide-angle lens to get the entire court…

And you say to yourself, “I don’t see why you bothered, Chuck, you got the crowd, you got the floor, you got Jamar Abrams dunking, whoop dee doo.”

Oh yeah?

The reason I used the tripod, dear readers, was so that I could take several pictures, “rapid-fire” style, getting Abrams from start to finish on his dunk.

And then, using my startrails.de software program that I would normally employ for outdoor night long-exposure photography…

Well, I entered the pictures in that software – and I got this little abstract beauty.

Look out!

Well, this definitely worked better than I expected.  You can see Jamar Abrams going through the air, and slamming it down.  Now what I need to do, once I get home, is re-stitch everything together so as to delineate Abrams’ complete body – not just his uniform and face – and bring this picture from abstract concept to full flowing movement.

I got this.  Heck yeah I got this.