The summer tag rugby season started last night for me and my team. Despite playing for many years now, we still seem to lose more matches than we win, and sadly this year has started in much the same way. Tag rugby accounts for much of my spare time for the 9 weeks of the league as I play and referee the game, but on occasion I do bring my camera along to get some photographs also. This picture is from one of last year’s matches which I think we might have actually won.
Photographing tag rugby can be difficult – much like photographing all sports really. To get sharp shots, you require very fast shutter speeds, but the action only starts at 7pm in the evening, and games can be going up until after 9pm, so even in the long summer evenings, light can fall dramatically making fast shutter speeds a real challenge.
In this case, there were a few things that I was able to do (or in one case possibly could have done) to help this cause. Regular readers of the blog will have seen these discussed before, but they are the key variables in getting exposures where you want them and so it’s no harm to detail the process I used for this shot again.
Firstly, to maximise the light hitting the sensor, I used as wide an aperture as possible. My main lenses are all what would be regarded as “fast” lenses in that they allow me open the aperture right up and accordingly use a higher shutter speed.
Secondly, I bumped up the ISO as high as I could before noise becomes a real worry. For me, that limit is generally about ISO1600, and the tradeoff is sharpness in the image versus noise. Here, I shot for sharpness, and actually the noise isn’t that bad (especially at this size), primarily thanks to the capabilities of the Nikon D300 in this regard. Had I taken this photo with my Nikon D50 I’d have either had lots of noise in the final image, or been forced back to ISO400 for the same noise levels, which would in turn have forced me to use a shutter speed that was 4 times slower.
So with shutter speed, aperture and ISO all considered, the only additional variable I could have added was more light – in this case in the form of flash. I didn’t go down that route for a few reasons. Firstly, I wouldn’t have wanted to distract Olivia on her dash for the try line with a flash of light in her eyes. Secondly, I’d have had to have set the flash power very high to get enough light landing on her, and that in turn would have meant the flash would take time to recharge after each shot, limiting me to a shot every second at best. For sports, where you want to capture a fast moving event, that’s not a good limit to have to work within. I shot this photo at 5 frames per second, maximizing my chances of getting a good image. The final reason I didn’t use flash was that it would have limited me to 1/250s for the shutter speed. Now this may seem contradictory to the aim of adding flash to get a sharp picture, but had I been able to effectively kill the ambient evening light by using a small aperture with this slower shutter speed, the very short duration of the flash itself (which now would have been the only source of light in the image) would have ensured that Olivia stayed sharp. However the background would have gone to black – maybe not a problem here as it might have made a good image – but the main problem was that while it was getting dusky, it wasn’t dark enough for me to easily take the ambient light out of the equation.
Thankfully, with aperture and ISO adjustments, I could keep the shutter speed high, and so get a nice sharp image of a piece of action in the game. I can’t remember if Olivia went on to score a try for us, but there’s no harm in assuming she did!
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