Ross County vs Caledonian Thistle

Some pics from yesterday's pre-season friendly between Ross County and Caledonian Thistle at Victoria Park in Dingwall.

This was the first time in what must be over a year that I shot a football match with two cameras, one with a 70-200mm f/2.8 and one with a 300mm f/2.8 + 1.4 extender. It paid off with the shot of Andrew Barrowman scoring County's goal which I was able to get with the shorter range of the zoom.

County's new manager Dick Campbell is a photographer's dream. He stays right at the side of the pitch the whole time, frequently shouting to players and giving directions. Plus the guy just looks like your classic football hard man. (Okay, maybe not in the second pic, but usually he does.) He seems like a nice bloke too. I've briefly met him a couple of times now and he can obviously tell that I'm the new kid on the block, so he tones down the gruff. Gotta respect that.

Based on my results from this match (which I'm happy with) and my results from previous matches (which I wasn't happy with) here's what I'd suggest for covering a football match with a two-camera set-up:

• Sit about 1/3 of the way along one side of the pitch. If you're looking for photos of one particular team then sit closer to the opposing team's goal.

• Use the camera with your long lens to cover the further half of the pitch, and the distant side of the nearer half. You'll have good range for the opposing team's goals and you'll have the players in 'your' team facing you.
• When the action comes into the near half, switch to the cam with your zoom. Most of the action you care about in this half will be around the goals.

What would make this set-up really good would be if the zooms had focus-stop buttons on them like the long teles, but you can get around that by using the camera's AE-lock button for focus (which a lot of football shooters do anyway) or you can switch to one-shot focus mode which is what I ended up doing.

Here's a rough illustration of the set-up described above:

Also for about 10 minutes at the end of this match I tried something that I've been meaning to do for ages but kept forgetting. I switched from using only the centre focus point to using all 45 focus points, basically putting the camera into full do-all-the-focusing-for-me mode. Results were encouraging. Yes there was a lot of focus jumping when the action was far away, but you need to balance that with the advantage of shooting much closer action because you don't need to keep the middle of the frame over one player. I'm a sucker for in-your-face action so I'll probably try shooting this way for at least one half of the match next time.

Here's a sample frame. Lousy shot of course but it's just an extreme example to illustrate the point. The players were 15-20 feet away from me at an effective focal length of 546mm. If I'd been using the centre focus point (marked 'X') it may have snapped the focus onto the background at this point. Now imagine if a split second later the players had moved closer together and the ball had bounced up into frame. That would have been a great shot and I'd have missed it. There's definitely a case to be made for using auto-select focusing.