Month
October 07
Offense 8
Football season is a great time to test a photographer's ability to capture dynamic images. This is one subject where you can actually improve with practice. And the more practice the better.
This year after making arrangements to shoot 4 home games for a local junior college, I checked out the schedule and discovered that 3 of the 4 games were at night. Ugh! There is nothing like an under lit high school stadium to complicate one's picture taking ability.
In the past, for day games, I used a hand held 80-400 F4.5 zoom lens. Simply not fast enough for night photography. I did some research on the internet and determined that an F2.8 or better aperture lens would be critical. I thought about renting but ended up buying a Sigma 120-300 F2.8 DX zoom lens.
The lens is big and slightly too heavy to hand hold so I constructed a home made bipod out of a deer rifle bipod I found at a local hunting store. This has turned out to be a pretty good combination. Monopods aren't quite stable enough for me and tripods aren't allowed on the field.
The image above was captured with a prosumer DSLR with Sigma 120-300 F2.8 DX zoom mounted on a fabricated bipod with major post processing, especially grain reduction.