I've been shooting the lovely ladies of Lancaster County 's(PA)Dutchland Rollers for about a year and a half now, and it has been a blast. Derby today is all female flat track roller derby action, and while some parts of it may be recognizable to old geezers like me who remember seeing it on black and white TV in the 50's, this is the real deal. No fake fights (or real ones), no hair pulling, no scripted winners and losers, no looking like wrestling on roller skates. These ladies are college students, wives, mothers, and are all business when it comes to competition and skating. If you've heard of a league in your area and haven't been to a bout yet, you owe it to yourself to pack your gear and give it a try.
Fair warning...derby action is not that easy to capture. Derby rinks have a tendency to be poorly lit, have very high ceilings that make bouncing flash all but impossible without adapters, and the action on a short flat track is fast! If you're close to the action (and in most of the rinks I've seen you will be), a built in flash or speedlight will work to a degree, but unless you have a set up with multiple strobes around the track, you may not be entirely happy with the results. In my experience, while the flash does indeed "freeze" the action, backgrounds appear under exposed and flat, and frankly, I'm just not crazy about the look you get.
I shoot with a Canon 40D and my 85mm f/1.8 lens almost all the time, rarely try flash, and can usually get a fair amount of "keepers" if I concentrate on what I'm doing and not get caught up in the action. Shooting without flash in low light generally requires a fast lens and high ISO's, something today's digital SLR's can easily handle. With the 40D/85mm f1.8 combination I can set the ISO at 1250 and get decent shots at 2.0 and 2.5. A spinoff of the high ISO speed is the appearance of "noise" in the photo. Again, with today's cameras, especially recent Canon and Nikon models, the noise levels are quite acceptable even at those high ISO's. Of course, a good noise reduction program should be a must tool in everyone's Photoshop basket of goodies, and the one I use and recommend is a product from Imagenomic called Noiseware. It does a great job, they have a free trial version, and for about $50 US for the standard version and $70 US for the Pro edition, it's a decent buy.
Another important consideration is the focus mode of your camera. The 40D has a AI Servo mode that sets exposure with a partially depressed shutter button, but monitors the frame and refocuses if camera or subject is moved...a nice feature.
There are many other factors and camera settings to consider, in addition to where you're standing in relation to the action. Is it coning at you? Going left to right in front of you? Coming off a turn? The best advice I can give is to bring along plenty of memory cards and experiment with different settings and shooting positions. Check out the Dutchland Rollers if you're in the neighborhood, or check out their Flickr pages to see what you might be missing.
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