Toronto Wolfpack (sports photography again)

For the past couple of matches of the Toronto Wolfpack rugby league team I’ve taken my D7100 and Sigma 70-200 f2.8 lens and got some shots that I’ve been very pleased with. Obviously the range of the 70-200 is limited so this week I took the 2x Extender and used that on the D610 in DX crop mode. So this is what I learned about shooting sports with an extender. One, it gives you more reach (well, duh). Two, at a decent shutter speed (I was set to 1/1250) there’s no noticeable shake or movement in the picture.

However, and this is the downside, because the extender takes away 2 stops I was shooting a minimum aperture of f5.6 and often at 2/3 stop more at f7.1. Unfortunately that is just not open enough to provide the separation between the on-field action and the crowd behind so I was left with a lot of decent pictures but not many that I felt were good pictures. Next time it will be back to f2.8 without the extender and I might just have to rely on the ‘zoom by feet’ strategy instead.

Toronto Wolfpack captain Craig Hall