| NIGHT FOOTBALL |
Technical
Situations
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LIGHTING MATRIX Lighting, or the lack of it, is the single most important facto when shooting football.
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Football Cheat Sheet |
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- select ... curves - crop
- high pass - Imogenics - Pictographics - hue & sat - green
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Peter Read Miller Notes - Sports Illustrated 06/02/09
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First Try (2001) My first images were of the team leaders receiving instruction from the referees. No problem. Next I shot images of coaches and cheerleaders on the sidelines in static situations. No problem. Then I tried to capture images of the players in action. Forget it. The photos were well exposed with rich saturated color but there was simply too much ghosting of the players running across the field. Realizing the slow shutter speed from the start, I tried to capture images at the peak of action when the players were at a momentary stand still but this didn't work either. Now I know why the JV photos in the weekly football bulletin are so much better than the photos of the varsity team at night.
Second Try I am not one to retreat from a challenge. The following week, I added an SB-25 shoe mount flash unit with a telephoto fresnal attachment to focus the light more tightly on the players being photographed. Many nature photographers use the fresnal lens attachment to light up a subjects eyes in bird photography. I generally avoid flash in most situations but night time high school football is the exception. I did notice that the F100 automatically set the flash sync at 1/60th of a second. Notice the ghosting that resulted from the slow shutter speed.
F 5.6, 1/60, 1600 Fuji neg. @ 1250
Third Try (2006) For the past couple years, I've been shooting day games for Santa Ana College (SAC) with a digital SLR and 40-800 VR lens. Not the type of challenge that night games present. While the digital body is acceptable, the zoom lens is simply too slow for night games. With day games, the photographer can focus on the action on the field without concern for lighting conditions.
F 8.0, 1/5000, D2H @ISO 320
I have posted numerous images of SAC day games under the "football" section of this site.
Fourth Try (2007) The field where SAC plays was recently upgraded to artificial turf so that more games can be played versus natural grass which gets beat up pretty badly by the end of football season. Unfortunately, SAC gets the prime times at 6:00 on Friday and Saturday nights. I kind of got spoiled shooting in afternoon light in the previous years. Now I have to develop a strategy for shooting night games. While there are a lot of web sites that touch lightly on shooting football at night, I've not found anything that I could depend on as a detailed guide.
The first step is to get a fast telephoto lens. While 300 mm is probably the minimum, camera manufacturer's lenses can cost several thousand for an F2.8 lens. After considerable research, I purchased a Sigma 120-300 F2.8. This lens is approximately $1,800 but has been recently upgraded with better coating, better foot, better front lens cap, etc so I opted for the newer model but it was $900 more expensive. Is it worth the extra, probably not, and if I had the older model I wouldn't have upgraded which also holds true with my older 300-800.
I've used the lens on a monopod to get familiar with it, but this is not an image stabilized lens and a monopod is not a cure all. Since tripods are not allowed on the field, I went to a gun shop and purchased an inexpensive bipod for supporting a deer rifle. I replaced the head with a panorama head and a camera quick mount. I had to make several additional modifications to fit my needs.
Now the hard part, figuring out what settings to use on the camera body. Details other than ISO are noticeably missing from other web sites in my research:
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