Ruggerpix – ‘A Challenging Afternoon’ for both teams and the photographer.

 

Ilkley vs Pocklington (North One East) k/o 2.15, 20^th November 2021

 The venue: Stacks Field, Ilkley, Yorkshire.

                                     

I had made all my preliminary preparations for this assignment on the day before.

My camera – Canon 7D SLR with twin battery pack, all batteries fully charged, a formatted 16gb memory card plus one spare and my Sigma 70-200, F2.8 lens which I find to be most useful for this type of work, finally a Slik monopod to help keep the camera steady.

Checked all camera settings functioning and then laid all out ready to pack into my equipment backpack on the Saturday morning.

On the following morning the weather was dry but a little overcast and felt chilly so made sure I was well wrapped up then finally packed everything away.

We managed to arrive at Stacks Field comfortably well in advance of the 2.15pm k/o which gave me chance to have a walk around the pitch and  go through various camera checks.

I usually set the camera shutter speed to 1/1000sec. and the ISO to 400 these generally give good results but it soon became apparent that the overcast cloud rolling down from the Dales and the cool breeze were going to be a challenge to both camera and photographer.

Most of the afternoon was spent constantly adjusting camera settings knowing full well that decreasing the shutter speed could produce image blur and increasing the ISO would produce image noise (grain) but it had to be done to let adequate light into the camera to produce at best an acceptable result to capture the fast action.

More importantly I had to constantly adjust my scarf to produce a warm happy photographer.

The decreasing light levels made action photography quite a challenge and a lot of work was required in my image editing software Adobe Lightroom.

To view all photographs from the afternoons rugby please follow the link to my dedicated website Ruggerpix

 Ruggerpix

 A full match report can be viewed at Ilkley RFC website.