Using strobes is the best way to shoot the basketball and get the best skin tones. I have four Alienbee B1600s on a catwalk lighting the basketball court.

Depending on the room’s colors, the color can shift and give you a color shift even with the studio strobes. The reason is the light is bouncing off those colored walls and ceilings. Even the crowd’s clothing can affect the color temperature.

There are a couple of ways to get a color measurement of the light. One way is using the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport system. Then, after I pull the RAW photo into Lightroom, I just click on the eye dropper tool and put it on the grey square I pointed to in the picture.

Walk onto the court, hold the card where the players will be, and then take a photo.

As long as you shoot RAW, you will get the best colors because you can tweak this later in the post-production of PhotoShop or Lightroom, for example.

So when the play is going quick and correct in front of you, just take the photo.

While strobes will give you the best color, as long as you are shooting RAW and taking these pictures of the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport, you can dial in and get the best color with the existing light.

My first preference is the ExpoDisc, but the cool thing with the ColorChecker is you now have more colors for comparison. You will be able to see under some lighting conditions that even after you click on the 18% grey square, you may not be able to get an actual purple color, and since that is on the card, you will see that it is the best you can get.