The Volvo Ocean Race stopover in Galway last year, which spanned the June bank holiday weekend, remains one of my favourite photographic experiences to date. So it’s exciting to see Galway bidding to host a stopover for the 2011-2012 race. Should the race return to Galway, I will be returning to photograph it. In the meantime I can re-live last year’s stopover through some of the images I captured over the weekend of the in-port racing.
I had use that weekend of a 70-200mm VR lens – the same type lens that I was using at Cáit and Martin’s wedding last weekend in Galway. Where I found that lens to be lacking at the wedding, particularly at the reception, out in Galway Bay in what turned out to be the nicest weekend of 2009 the lens was fantastic. Same lens, different environments, very different impressions.
Even a general long zoom like that 70-200mm lens, which is one of the crown jewels of Nikon’s zoom lens collection, cannot be all things to all people. But if I was a regular sports shooter, or even more specifically a marine sports shooter, I would be packing this lens ahead of all others. On the water, even when I was able to achieve shutter speeds of 1/2500s due to the bright sunshine and high reflectivity of the water, the vibration reduction capabilities of the lens came in useful.
Additionally, the ability to switch into “Active VR” instead of “Normal VR” when the water got particularly choppy as we passed behind the racing yachts meant every single squeeze of the shutter resulted in a usable frame. And its focus in those bright conditions was incredibly fast and precise.
That fast focus, combined with the 200mm reach and the vibration reduction, allowed me to get frames such as this one, where the shot was there for just an instant, as one of the crew members on Telefonica Black gave me a thumbs up between the two in-port races.
Recent Comments