Moving Forward

Photo of the Day

Last night I went out to the Purdue Soccer Complex for about 20 minutes to test a few things out. I just received my 300mm f/2.8 lens from Sigma earlier in the day. I have rented the lens during football season so I knew what it could do. What I didn’t know was how it would perform with a doubler on it. The Boilers were playing a team from Canada as part of their spring schedule. I like the idea of trying out a big lens on soccer or football. The field really lends itself to seeing what it can do. This is the perfect weekend to test out a new lens. I have a very full weekend ahead of me with plenty of opportunities to try it out. I will be shooting four different sports so I will see how it performs overall. Soccer was a tough sport to start with. Baseball or football would have been easier as you can convert quickly to just shooting upper body as the players comes closer. Using the lens at 600mm for soccer meant that about one quarter of the field was lost to me. If I was covering the event I would have had a second body on me, but for this test I just had the one camera and lens. Of course then the action would just sit in the 1/4 of the field that I couldn’t shoot. When you are limited to time that makes things a little frustrating. I never thought that I would complain about having too much lens. I guess that is a good thing.

Technical Data

For this section today I will just say that I was very excited to see what the 300mm lens could do with a 2x converter on it. The first thing that I want to say is that the doubler also doubles your f-stop. So that means that my nice new f/2.8 lens instantly became a f/5.6 lens. When shooting something like soccer you still get a nice bokeh if the subject is far enough away from the background. The problem with shooting at 5.6 is that you don’t let as much light into the camera. Shooting at Purdue where noon starts are common during football that isn’t such a big deal. A night event though could pose some problems. The other thing that I noticed was that the lens was not as fast focusing as I would like it to be. I know that the lens itself is quick. With my 1.4x converter on it it is fast as well. It was just a bit slow when switching subjects. That is a lot of lens to drive so I can understand it a bit. Some of that could be user error so I will have to test it a bit more. I found myself with the doubler shooting events across midfield that I have never shot before during a soccer game from the end zone. 600mm really has some reach to it. I think that it comes with a huge price using an extender though. The image quickly can fall apart. It is something to play around with though.

Thank You

A couple of days ago this blog went over 1,000 followers. If you count the Facebook and Twitter followers it is higher, but as far as people clicking the follow button on the site I hit the milestone on Tuesday. It is mind blowing to me that 1,000 people cared enough about even one picture to do that. As the follower count has risen I think that my need to provide something more than a snapshot has as well. Thank you to all of those who follow the blog no matter how you do it. It was an honor to have one person follow me. To have 1,000 is just crazy in my mind.