I recently made contact with the Hertfordshire Hurricanes American Football Team who are Hertfordshire’s University team. They play their games during term time which means a winter season, which is great for fans of British American football as you can follow the game throughout the year.

They said they were happy for me to pop down to Hatfield Uni to meet them & take some photos, so I arranged to go down to one of their first training sessions of the season. They train on Tuesday, Thursday & Sunday. The weekday sessions are evening under floodlights. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to try out some photography under floodlights, as I’ve never done this floodlit sports before.

Coaching staff said they were happy for me to wander round the training ground taking shots & these are some of the results.

Due to the poor lighting conditions ISO had to be ramped up. All the shots here were taken at ISOs of between 2000 & 6400. Although noise is greatly increased the 5D MkII does have good high ISO quality & a run through with some post production Imegenomic Noiseware has produced some credible results.

It was an ideal opportunity to play with shutter speeds. So I slowed them down a little to accentuate movement & here’s a few results:

Of course, there is more to sports photography than action shots; I always like to catch personal studies of players concentrating, lsitening, watching or just day dreaming.