Last Sunday afternoon I drove up to a sports centre at the edge of Peterborough to photograph an American Football Match. The Peterborough Saxons took on the London Cobras.

The weather was gorgeous, nice & sunny. I took the 5D MkII & my older 20D together with 3 lenses – 70-200mm L f2.8 IS, 100-400mm L f4.5-5.6 & the 600mm L F4.

I had previously emailed the chairman of the Peterborough Saxons to obtain permission to shoot the game. He said he was happy for me to do so. It’s funny when you turn up somewhere with big lenses, the amount of people who think you are a professional photographer. I was asked if I’d been sent by the league – I wish.

The 600mm got most use during the afternoon which saw the Saxons lose to the London Cobras 49 points to 6. To be honest, I didn’t really follow the ins & outs of the game; you miss so much when viewing the game through a camera viewfinder.

The shots here are more ‘arty’ shots rather than straight action, more will follow. They have been processed via Lightroom & I’m quite pleased with the look of them, though they may not be to everyone’s taste I suppose.

I shot somewhere in the region of 600 pics but suffered something of a schoolboy error. Swapping between the monopod-mounted 600mm lens & the other camera I managed to knock the dial from AE-priority to manual & ran off quite a lot of shots on the 600mm of 1/200sec at F11 rather than 1/800 plus at F4. This meant that quite a lot came out blurred & were binned leaving me with about 450 useable shots.