Sweet 1/16

Louisville's Gorgui Dieng and Montrezl Harrell guard DePaul's Cleveland Melvin.

Russ Smith passes the ball as he drives the lane.

 Gorgui Dieng goes inside to score.

Coach Rick Pitino on the sidelines.

 Peyton Silva glides in to score.

Pre-Madness

With the NCAA's Sweet Sixteen just on the horizon this is as close as I am going to get to this year's March Madness. With a lot of high school basketball games under my belt this season I had a great opportunity to help a good friend, Steve Woltmann, cover some college basketball games in the last month. When the ranked Louisville Cardinals came to town to play DePaul I helped Steve shoot the game for DePaul.

When I was younger I remember looking at a lot of the sports magazines and thinking, "if I had lights this would be a lot easier." It is true the lighting can take photos to another level however, doing something better does not mean it is easier. This is not the first time I have used strobes at a sporting event but it has been a while and there is a big adjustment in how you shoot a game with strobes.

Because of the recycle time on the strobes you need to shoot single frame with about a 2 second delay between shots. Concentration on the decisive moment is key rather than a one or two second burst of frames. If you shoot to soon the best photos will be about 6 stops under exposed when the lights do not fire.

In addition to the quality of the images editing is much easier since you do not have 800 images to sort through at the end of the game.

Here are a of my few moments of the Cardinals taking on the Blue Demons.

-john

All photos © 2013 John Konstantaras