Beach Tag, Inchydoney

I spent the weekend in and around Clonakilty in West Cork with my tag rugby team, the Ruck ‘n’ Rollers, for one of the Sony Ericsson Beach Tag tournaments, which took place on Saturday on Inchydoney beach.  While I was focused on playing for most of the day, an exhibition match during the tournament, pitching Cork v Rest of the World, gave me an opportunity to take a few photos.

I’ve photographed tag rugby in the past, and it has been a case of learning from my mistakes to reach a point where now, when I photograph it, I tend to come away with a higher proportion of usable shots than before.

Photographing it on a sunny beach in the middle of the afternoon makes things a bit easier as there is an abundance of light.  That means fast shutter speeds, freezing the action, which is usually want you want to achieve with sports photography.

The exposure will change across the pitch, particularly as players change directions and so may be running towards or away from the sun.  Rather than try to compensate for that on the fly, I shoot in aperture-priority mode.  If light levels are lower and I want to ensure I hold a minimum shutter speed, I might shoot in shutter-priority mode.  Either way, the camera is working out the exposure.

On Saturday, due the abundance of light-coloured sand in the scene, I had to dial in some positive exposure compensation to tell the camera “this scene is lighter than what you expect, so please leave it a bit brighter than you naturally would”.   Afterall, the camera isn’t as clever as we might think, and is just going to try to get everything to be as light or dark as 18% grey.

With exposure tied down, framing was reliant on the use of a zoom lens, so that as players came nearer I could use a shorter focal length, and as they were further away I could use a longer one, and in both cases fill the frame with the action.  I used my 50-150mm lens, which has a 3x zoom range and was adequate, though a wider range of focal lengths would give more options without having to change lenses.

Last to deal with was focus, and I shot in auto-focus using the Continuous Focus mode of the D300 – this uses 3D tracking to keep focus locked on an object even if it is moving towards or away from the camera.  For the shot above, which was one of a sequence of four where these two players were chasing the ball, it ensured that they stayed in focus for the entire sequence.  Without a mode like that, photographing fast moving sports would be a significantly more difficult task.