My penultimate Volvo Ocean Race post (for now at least!) brings me in close to the action on the Delta Lloyd boat for a shot of 12 of the 13 crew members – I’m guessing that the missing man is Gerd-Jan Poortman, who is most likely out of frame at the bow of the boat, seeing as he was rostered as bowman for the race.
This photo was taken on the windward leg of the first race as the yachts raced towards the turn for the first time. As for the previous action shot I posted, this was taken from the deck of one of the media boats. As I found out on Saturday, boats aren’t very steady platforms from which to photograph, so it was fortunate that it was a very bright day, and that I had thought ahead and equipped myself with a lens well-suited to taking pictures from a moving boat.
(“Science-bit” alert – you may want to skip on a paragraph…)
There’s a rule-of-thumb in photography known as the sunny-16 rule, which states that on a sunny day at f/16 a rough estimate of the shutter speed is the inverse of the ISO. So how did that work out here? Firstly, my ISO was 200 – I wanted to keep noise to a minimum as much as possible, and as ISO goes up, so too does noise. So the sunny-16 rule would suggest that the exposure would have been around about 1/200s at f/16. As you open up the aperture, the shutter speed gets faster – so 1/200s @ f/16 is equivalent to 1/400s @ f/11 or 1/800s @ f/8. Push the aperture another stop to f/5.6 and the shutter speed should be in the region of 1/1600s. Saturday must have been the average sunny day because when I was in Aperture Priority mode at f/5.6 the shutter was actually working out exactly at 1/1600s.
(“Science-bit” over…)
So the sunny weather helped me to get my shutter speeds down to thousandths of a second territory. Such a short shutter speed would freeze the action (including water being churned up by the yachts) and help counter movement of the camera and still keep the shot sharp.
The lens I was shooting with for the weekend was Nikon’s excellent (but expensive) 70 – 200mm f/2.8 VR lens – it is a beast of a thing, weighing 1.6kg, but it is possibly the best zoom lens money can buy. And for me last weekend, its most important attribute was its VR capabilities. VR stands for Vibration Reduction, and basically is a technology which reduces the effects of camera shake. A floating element in the lens helps to keep the image that is projected on to the sensor alot steadier than the camera or the lens might be.
When you’re on a boat out in Galway Bay, this is a useful thing, and on Saturday it was the difference between probably having 50% of my shots blurry (even at those super fast shutter speeds) versus having maybe 5% of my shots blurry. And considering that I ended up taking about 750 shots on the boat, having that particular lens in my bag meant over 300 extra shots that didn’t need to go straight in the bin during my edit.
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