Another tag rugby league kicked off last week for the Ruck ‘n’ Rollers, the team I play with, with games being played under lights on the astroturf in Wesley College in Dublin. Tag rugby gives me a chance to return to sports photography, and last night, as I watched Aoife play with the Eirgrid tag rugby team, I had my camera with me to take some photos.
The Eirgird team were playing in the third round of games last night, and I watched from the sidelines having enjoyed victory in the Ruck ‘n’ Rollers’ match earlier. The pitch was floodlight and this helped a little bit in my quest to get some photographs of the action. Just a little though.
For sports photography, you really need a fast shutter speed to freeze the action. In an ideal world, in a fast moving game a fast shutter speed is 1/500s or faster. But a sports photographer is totally at the mercy of the available light (99 times out of 100 at least) because adding light using flash is usually neither practical nor possible. The distance between the camera and the subject can be the width or even length of a pitch, and for the kind of power needed to throw light that distance a shoe mounted flash is going to be inadequate. Also, flash photography can be distracting, and the last thing a player wants as they reach for a tag or run for the try line is a blinding flash of light in their eyes.
The available light therefore is what you have to work with, and last night I found that even with those floodlights, at the widest aperture of f/2.8, and pushing the ISO right up to 1600 on my Nikon D300, I was still stuck with shutter speeds in the region of 1/100s.
I cheated this a little and deliberately underexposed my shots by about 2/3s of a stop to shoot at 1/160s. This got me conforming to the rule of thumb for sharp shots which says to keep your shutter speed no slower than 1/f, where f is your focal length (I was at 150mm). Even at this you’ll probably get at best 70% of shots sharp. So underexposing helped me get more sharp shots, and by shooting in RAW I knew I could later push the exposure back up in post-processing, albeit at the expense of a little more noise in the final image. My rational was that a noisy photo is infinitely better than a blurry photo.
Speaking of noise, I had read a photographer say online during the week that ISO 1600 was as high as he found he could go on the Nikon D300 to get usable shots, so I stuck at this limit to check the theory, and I would tend to agree. At 900 x 600 pixels as the image above is, the shot is very usable, but I suspect it would print acceptably up to a 12″ x 8″ print also.
By the way the photo above is of Conor – one of the founding members of the Eirgrid tag team. He also is the boyfriend of Laura, who has appeared on the blog twice in the past. This action shot is of Conor successfully tagging one of the opposing team to prevent him breaking through to score a try.
The Eirgrid team (who’s name I forget but it is something to do with blue and purple) went on to win the match well, so it was a good night all round for me and my tag rugby friends last night. And I came away with some good action shots too.
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