Shooting rugby with the A33 and 300mm F2.8 G-series lens

For most people it's not that often that you get to use Sony's 300mm f2.8 G-Series Telephoto. I've had a chance to shoot a couple games this week with the A33 and the 300mm. You can see my blog while shooting soccer here.

Following the soccer game in the fog I used the lens/camera combo for a full sun high school rugby game.

The first part of the game I shot backlit. Right into the sun. I was trying to minimize the amount of subject with split lighting. Split lighting seems to be the biggest issue with digital images. It can handle full sun fine or full shade, but the split lighting is tough. You need to expose for the dark shadow, but the highlight blows away. It wasn't as bad with film, but now I find it better to find the angle where the subject is completely backlit. I set the white balance to open shade and the mode was "Aperture Priority". If you look at the red girls face you can see the full sun on the right side. One of the plusses of shooting backlit is the nice separation you get from the background because of the rim light. One of the challenges is the turf is in full light and tends to blow out a bit (not an issue with real grass). Another issue might be flare, but the 300mm has a huge lens hood which I was using. Of course the real reason I shoot backlit is so I can get some sun on my face instead of the back of my neck.

The second part of the game I walked around to get full sun on the subject. This gave me an exposure of 1/2500 at F4 with ISO 400. I set this manually since the light wasn't changing but the camera meter was jumping around too much. I also switched to full sun white balance.

I was shooting from the end-zone with the red team running straight towards me and the light. The lens was working perfectly in this situation and I had a number of sharp images. This one was an open field play, running right towards me and is un-cropped.

Since the lens is so sharp and the light was bright I felt the image quality from the shoot was very high. This is a cropped shot but seems to hold up because of the lens quality.

This final shot was when the sun went behind the cloud. It has lost it's full contrast but is sharp and holds great detail. You can read the name on the ball and the shirt.

I'm not sure when I'll get to play with this lens again, but it's a great piece of glass and the fast aperture gives you great flexibility under different lighting situations.

Rob Skeoch

www.thepicturedesk.ca