A selection of shots from the game at Leicester yesterday, all taken with my long lens:

1/800 sec at f5.6, ISO 400 at 390mm

1/640 sec at f5, ISO 400 at 135mm

Interesting to compare the picture in the match report on the Beeb with my shot of the try scorer:

1/640 sec at f5, ISO 400 at 135mm

Unfortunately my shot of the player just about to touch down [this was the next frame, shooting at the full 6.5 frames per second] is a little blurred, due to the drop in shutter speed:

1/400 sec at f5, ISO 400 at 135mm

1/320 sec at f5, ISO 400 at 235mm

1/1600 sec at f5, ISO 400 at 360mm

1/1000 sec at f5.6, ISO 400 at 400mm

1/1600 sec at f5.6, ISO 400 at 400mm

1/800 sec at f5, ISO 400 at 200mm

1/800 sec at f5, ISO 400 at 200mm

Lola, whose factory is quite close to where I live, had a parade of sports cars in town today, and it was an impressive sight / sound. I’ve never tried to do motion blur before, so this was a good opportunity to try it out for the first time. I’m reasonably pleased as a first effort: I think the keepers below create a reasonable impression of speed, bearing in mind that the cars were doing all of 20mph going past on the ringroad. I’d up the shutter speed a notch or two, as the level of distortion is probably a little south of the limit, and the effect that I was hoping for.

I did think about upping the speed, but got distracted when I hit the limit on the camera’s buffer about 3 consecutive times, which is a real shame. There was no way of anticipating the density of the cars on the parade but next time, I’ll switch from raw to jpeg, and possibly even step down the image size a notch or two, just to make sure that I have more headroom. Until I get my 50d :).

I was taken to the Oval a couple of weeks ago [very kindly at the expense of a vendor] for the England vs South Africa 4th test. I’ve always wondered what the chances were of being turned away at the turnstile of some event because I was carrying a bagful of equipment. I decided to take a chance this time as I hadn’t paid…

I spent pretty much the whole day shooting with my long L lens [100-400mm]. I find this quite a tough lens to use: obviously you are operating with a very narrow angle of view but – not wanting to sound like the lily-livered office dweller that I am – handheld it really starts to get heavy over a period of hours.

I tried to be systematic, despite a certain beer oriented clouding of judgement, and started to crack off a series of pictures framed on the batsman to co-incide with each bowling delivery. It has to be said that after about 60 repetitions, it starts to get fairly tedious. See earlier reference to beer.

Perseverence paid off – almost spectacularly, but not quite, with this shot:

This was, without doubt, the most exciting single picture that I’ve ever taken. I have a mate [who very kindly me leant me his Nikon D300 a few weeks ago – fantastic machine, enough to make me want to abandon the Canon ship on the spot] who likened taking a photo to a golf shot. I like the analogy a lot: the convergence of propicious circumstance, the satisfaction of connecting with the sweetspot… I just really, really wish that I’d cranked up the ISO to 400, which I did later in the day. This is almost fast enough: if you look closely between the ‘e’ and the ‘s’ in the lettering of the advertising hoarding, you can just see the bails flying. Bringing it up to 1/500 second that I was able to get later in the day would have just sharpened it up.

Frustratingly, this is the only time I’ve managed to have a backup disaster and delete the original data. For those who are interestied I shot this at 1/200, F5.6, and on aperture priority at 400mm.

A work colleague made a very interesting comparison with a shot that appeared on the Beeb website [picture 8]. There was a group of professional photographers sitting on the boundary about 20-30 yards to our left, one of whom must have caught this. Interesting to note the difference in talent, kit, and technique 😉