Friday Night Lights - High School Football

Nikon D4, Sigma 70-200mm ƒ/2.8, ISO 12800, 1/400, ƒ/2.8 [Touchdown for Milton HS]

I decided to shoot some high school football since I was taking my daughter to the game. While I have shot a lot of sports it has been a really long time since I shot a Friday night high school football game. I think the last time I did was with a film camera back in 1991 in Fort Worth, Texas with my good friend Morris Abernathy.

First of all I have to say shooting at ISO 12800 with these Nikon D4 cameras is just amazing. I know I never shot color high school football until now. WOW! I am shocked at the quality we now get out of these cameras.

Here are a few selects from the evening.

By the way I want you to know I did a custom white balance at the beginning of the game and then once the sun went down I did another custom white balance using the ExpoDisc.  A little cropping and that is it in all these photos.

My tips are pretty simple. Use long glass and stay way in front of the play. I prefer to shoot from the end zones so I get a clean background for the most part.

My lens of choice is the Sigma 120-300mm ƒ/2.8 and use most of the time with the 1.4 converter. Since I shoot these on my Nikon D4 I also crop in by 2x making the lens into a 840mm ƒ/4 lens on the longest part of the zoom.

I prefer to see the players faces and they tend to be looking towards the end zone if they are offense and the defense is looking in the direction of the other end zone.

In the series above these are just a few of the #3 from Milton getting a major break out and then scoring right in front of me. With that zoom I was able to keep him pretty tight throughout the run all the way to the last frame above of him scoring.