Photographing night football games

I'm adding this post to note a personal milestone overlooked in yesterday's post, the one featuring photographs from the Indiana Warriors NAFL semipro football game Saturday at Manual High School.

Until this past Saturday, I had not shot photos of a night football game since my first year out of college, when, as editor of the Columbus (Wis.) Journal-Republican weekly newspaper, I covered the Columbus Cardinals high school football team and used a 35mm film camera (shooting in black-and-white) and a Nikkormat zoom lens.

I would not have even remembered the detail about the camera if not for Paul Gero, who I met during my year in Columbus and who I mentioned here in a post last week. When he and I reconnected two years ago, he reminded me of the photographic gear that the Columbus newspaper used back then, something I had long forgotten. Gero, however, having spent his entire career in professional photography (mostly newspapers) and who now runs a wedding photography business in southern California, remembers it well.

My 30+ years of rust showed after I reviewed my images on the computer Saturday night at home after the game, but I nevertheless felt encouraged: I came closer to what I was hoping for than I expected.

At the game, I used my Canon 30D and Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens. I shot most of the game at the long end of the focal range (200mm), ISO 3200 and using the shutter priority mode (set at 1/250). I think it would have been wiser if I had gone at least another shutter increment or two faster, which would have pushed my f/stop to nearly wide open, as most of my images at 1/250 came out with the f/stop at 4.0 or one stop wider.

While most of my images were sharp at 1/250, so many of the better captures also had some blur (from subject movement, not camera shake) in areas I would have liked to have seen frozen, something I think a faster shutter could have gotten me. Still, the lighting at Manual High School's field was what I had expected -- not nearly as good as I had hoped and not what most photographers would prefer. And I kept the shutter at 1/250 because I feared that going faster and pushing the aperture to its maximum would cost me sharpness in the depth of field window. In retrospect, because of the distance I was from the subjects/targets, that probably should not have been as significant of a factor.

Because of the extremely high ISO (and 3200 is the highest my 30D will go), I did have to apply a noise-removal filter to all of my images in post-processing, and I was fully expecting to do that. It's the trade-off for needing to use those settings on the camera for night action. Fortunately, the software did help in that respect. When I reviewed the pictures after the Noiseware application, the serious noise was barely detectable.

Semipro football in Indianapolis

Above: The Indiana Warriors' Kendall Williams begins his return of a punt in the third quarter of the team's 30-0 loss to the Chicago Wolvervines in their NAFL game Saturday at Manual High School.


No less than three semipro football teams make Indianapolis their home -- the Indianapolis Tornados and Indiana Warriors of the North American Football League and the Indiana Generals of the Interstate Football League.

In addition to playing in the same expansive league, the Tornados and Warriors play in the same division: the Motor Belt Division. The Tornados play their home games at Park Tudor School; the Warriors at Manual High School, while the Generals call Arlington High School their home.

It was at Manual that the Warriors, playing their second year in the NAFL, met the Chicago Wolverines on Saturday night in a rematch of a contest the Warriors had won 7-6 in Chicago two weeks earlier. This time, however, the Warriors were on the losing end of a 30-0 drubbing, dropping their season record to 3-5.

The Warriors have two games left on their schedule this season, and both are 7 p.m. home games: Sept. 12 vs. the Nashville Storm and Sept. 19 vs. the Louisville Saints.

Above: A Wolverines player (25) seems overmatched in this blocking assignment of a Warriors lineman.


Above: The Warriors' Cornelius Edmond (20) gets just enough of the Wolverines' running back's leg to trip him up for a tackle.

Above: Kenny Martin (11) just manages to get a pass off before being slammed by a Wolverines defender.

Indiana Warriors quarterback Kenny Martin (above) takes a pounding from two Chicago Wolverines linemen in a third quarter sack.


Above: A grimacing Greg O'Bannon walked off the field gingerly, complaining of a hip pointer. He was back in the game a few minutes later.