Images

With the delay of the 2020 high school football season we are in the later winter of 2021 playing the 2020 football season. Kick off was around 1300. It was the first time in a long time that I was at Washington State University’s Martin Stadium watching a football game on a Saturday with a 1300 kick off.

It was a cold afternoon and COVID-19 precautions were in place. Everyone had to wear a mask and all the players had to social distance on the sidelines.

Othello got out a quick 7 to 0 lead and Pullman scored to tie it up. Unfortunately, after that it was all Othello.

I did some research to the settings that other football photographers use. I decided today to try a few things because the game was being played in the middle of the day. I used my 2x extender on my 70-200mm lens. I wanted to see what it was like to shoot a game with a 400mm zoom. I also put the ISO on auto. This was a good decision as the field was partially shaded but mostly in the sun. I also shot only used JPG without the RAW photos. This was a suggestion of several bloggers. They wrote that for fast action the RAW slows down the writing of the photos to the card and you can miss some action. I had those problems in the past so I understood what they were saying.

I think the photos were pretty good overall. I ended up taking way more than I have in the past and I think that was due to the fact that I was using JPG only and my camera was working faster. I don’t feel that I lost ability to do the editing I needed to for the photos. So I will probably continue to use JPG for football in the future. I also was happy with the ISO set to auto for the most part. I had the shutter speed set to 1250 and the f-stop as low as it would go. Normally my 70-200mm would go to f/2.8 but with the 2x extender I could only go to f/5.6. I think with it being daylight that was fine. Where I had some issued was that if I was too close to the action the lower end of the zoom (140mm due to the 2x extender) hindered getting some shots. I did have a backup camera that would go much lower but it is hard to change cameras in the middle of a play. So if the team was close I would sometimes change cameras. But other times the action came to me and I didn’t have that chance.

This evening I was shooting photographs at the Pullman High School football game at Hobbs field. The game was between Pullman HS and the East Valley Knights.

Pullman dominated the whole game with the final score of 41 – 0.

During the game I used by my Canon 6D with the Canon 70-200 lens. I also was using the Canon 70D with a 50mm prime lens. I used my Spider Pro camera holster system. It worked very well for what I was doing.

I was able to speak to the sports photographer, Kai Eiselein, who works for the Daily News. He game we some pointers and tips about the camera settings for shooting the game. A little more than half the photos were shot with my adjusted settings and the others were shot at the settings I was using last week.

I seem to always be playing around with the settings in the manual mode in order to find the right balance between the shutter speed, ISO setting, and f/stop. I also changed the focus point on the 6D which made a huge difference in getting my photos later in the game.

This evening while working at the Pullman High School football game I decided to bring along my camera and take some photos. I was in the corner of the endzone for the whole game so all the photos originate from that one point.

I was using my Canon 6D and my Canon 70-200 f2.8 IS II lens. I really cranked up the ISO setting to allow me to take most photos at f/4 with a shutter speed of 1/640.

Pullman pulled away early in the game and never looked back. Black Hills is from Olympia and they made the trek to Pullman for some 2A football action. The final score of the game was 42 – 6.