This was my first time shooting a sports event – and it was rugby, a game that I can’t say I have much of an understanding of. But I enjoyed the challenge of trying to shoot something different.

Almost all of these shots were taken using my Nikon 70-300mm lens (which I purchased used via DCFever). I found the lens to be sharp enough, but I was really suffering with the maximum aperture of f/5.6 at the 300mm end. The day was quite overcast and I had to push the ISO to 1600 in order to be able to shoot wide open at 1/750th of a second. I would have preferred 1/1000th but didn’t want to go to 3200 ISO.

With my media pass, I was able to sit on those little green benches right along side the pitch. I confess that I spent a lot of time looking at the other photographers and their equipment – two or three camera bodies strung around their neck, mega-long and mega-fast telephoto lenses that I know cost HK$75,000 and up. I think that those are permanently out of my price range!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I shot approximately 2,500 photos in one day – about 6-700 of those the fans in the stands, the rest the players on the field. What’s truly mind-boggling at the moment though is that in the past, I’ve been averaging a couple hundred views of my photos per day on Flickr – the number spikes up to around 700 when I post a new set, drops down into the dozens if I haven’t posted in awhile. But my photos of fans in the stands received a total of almost 9,000 views in two days! Clearly people love looking at this kind of stuff – and it makes me wish I could have gone for all three days instead of just one.

Anyway, after combing through all the shots multiple times, here are my favorites. Enjoy!

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