Football Nights Revisited!

Sometimes the best football action shots are taken on the bench. Here’s one of my son Noah, taking a water break shot with the Pentax *istD at f4.5, 1/45 and ISO 1600.

I have learned over the past few months that sports photography is not easy. In fact I think it may be the most difficult, especially high school football. Technically you’re dealing with an impossible photographic situation. It’s like the photographic “perfect storm” kind of scenario.

High school football is generally played at night so there is almost never enough light. The light that is there is in the form of high intensity flood lights that blind you from one angle and provide some kind of weird color barely sufficient illumination from the other angle with lots of shadows everywhere. For this reason you almost always have to shoot with a fast lens wide open but because they are running around all the time you have to use a fast enough shutter speed to “stop action.”

If all that’s not difficult enough for you add to that the distance since the closest you probably will ever get to the action is about ten yards (from the sidelines) unless you are fortunate to catch a runner or receiver headed your way on the sidelines. Of course, in that case you have to make sure you balance the desire for a great shot with a desire to remain healthy since the only thing between you and a few hundred pounds of hustling padded & helmeted football player rushing at you is your camera. In the heat of the game nothing on the sidelines is safe and everyone who lives and works there is “taught” to drop everything and move when the action comes your way.

For all the reasons noted above this kind of photography has traditionally (meaning “Old School film photography) been dome using fast (high ISO) black & white film, sometimes pushed processed to get even faster, through huge and fast telephoto lenses set wide open using the fastest shutter speeds possible. These iconic images line the walls of sports museums and show athletes perfectly framed and in sharp focus against the blur of action around them. It is still possible to get these kinds of images using modern digital camera equipment but it’s not any easier now than it was before.

For my shots here and in the previous post I used the Pentax *istD with either the Tamron 18-200 or the Pentax 75-300 lens. In either case I set the ISO range to 200-3200 and set the camera for aperture priority with the lens wide open or used the “Action” mode, a special setting on the *istD’s mode dial for this kind of photography. I could not detect any significant difference in the outcome from either of these settings. Generally all acceptable shots ended up at ISO 1600, with an aperture from f3.5 to 5.6, and shutter at 1/30 to 1/90. The sharpness of the shot depended in large measure on how well I was able to hold the camera and track the action on the field.