Moles see fine tonight

This blog is about taking sports photos using consumer kit, working from the terraces of clubs at step 4 of the National League System. So, no Nikon D3S with its ISO range extendable to 102,400, or 200mm f/2 Nikkor lens with its combination of wide aperture and long view. Nor do I frequent Anfield, with its international standard floodlights (1400 lux minimum, 2000 lux recommended for high definition television). So, we have to improvise sometimes.

Tuesday saw Prescot Cables visiting Warrington Town, to play them for the fourth, and, as we have lost all four, thankfully last, time this season. Prescot had seven players normally in consideration for a start missing due to injury or work commitments, so it was unlikely to be a good evening. So it proved with Warrington scoring three goals in the first 13 minutes, with two more in the second half. The only consolation was Steven Tames taking the opportunity of a place in the starting XI to end a barren patch in front of goal.

Well, it is not the best of pictures, but a goal is a goal.

The photo above shows the pattern of the light on the pitch. More to the point, there is not one, the spread is fairly even. The spread of light depends on the siting of the lights - a column at each corner, or three or four columns along the sides - and how many lights are on each column. In my experience (relatively limited, as I have only been taking pictures at night games for a couple of years), there are dark patches where you cannot capture anything, and light patches that are very helpful. At Warrington, I suspect the lights passed their test with few values much above or below the average.

It quickly became apparent that I was not going to get very far with my 70-300mm lens, even at the lower focal length, the resulting pictures were very dark. Here is Cables' Lee Roberts at 125mm, f/4.8, 1/200s.

We can improve the lighting ...

... but it is still quite grainy.

So, it was time for emergency measures. I have a 50mm f/1.4 lens. The much better aperture (f/1.4 takes in 8 times as much light as f/4, and 16 times as much as f/5.6) gives a clear, light image when the action is immediately in front of the camera, for example Cables' Phil Cooney taking a throw in.

There are, however a coupe of disadvantages.

Firstly, action further than a few yards away will be small in the middle of the image. In practice, the lens can only really be used over the quarter of the pitch nearest to the camera. Take the original of the picture above of Steven Tames' goal.

Of course, we can crop out the unwanted part, but if the part we want to keep is too small, there may be issues with the quality of the resulting picture. Take this example, with Cables' Ashley Ruane.

This looks like a promising image to crop. However, when we do so, we find the players are quite blurred (which will be more apparent if you click on the image and view it at full size).

This picture also illustrates the second problem with the shorter lens. The auto focus point is a constant size in relation to the frame. Using the longer lens, and a camera with a small focus point like the D5000, it is easy with some practice to position the focus point wholly on the player. With the shorter lens, the focus point is far more likely to be partly on the player and partly on the background, so the camera may focus on either - you can see in the picture above that the advertising hoarding is in better focus than the players.

This means that more of the pictures will have to be rejected. The rest of the pictures from the game, in a somewhat smaller album than usual can be seen here.