Indoor Basketball Image Samples
Posted by David Chin on March 6th, 2007 in Amazing Nikon D200 Image SamplesBrian Ip aka “Drip01″ posted up these ISO1600 shots of a D-league game over at DPReview.com.
Go here to view a larger version of the images and read through the forum thread which he had started.
He used the Sigma APO 120-300 mm f2.8 EX IF HSM which he remarked was not as fast-focusing as the Nikkor 200mm f/2 VR. He talks more about the Sigma 120-300 here, commenting that it’s sharp even at wide-open apertures, and that he used the older, non-DG version. ISO 1600 was required to keep the shutter speed around 1/500 seconds, but even with this, the images are slightly underexposed due to the very dim lighting conditions there.
Of particular interest is his postprocessing method. The images were shot in RAW mode, and converted through Nikon Capture 4.4 where he decided to use COlor Mode IIIa for a boost in saturation and contrast, with NR (noise reduction) set at Intensity / Sharpness of 5 / 5. Noise reduction was further applied using Neat Image, and finishing touches and sharpening in Photoshop plus the FocalBlade sharpening plugin.
