Over the past year, I have donated a couple of photo shoot coupons to auctions for various fund raisers but no one has cashed one in yet, until last weekend. The guy who won the coupon coaches mens' rugby for UCSD. He said he didn't need any pics of himself but wanted to know if he could use the coupon to have me come out and shoot one of his team's bouts. I figured that it would be something totally new for me, so I said sure.
When it comes to shooting circus arts, I have a lot of experience as a performer and a teacher that gives me a good idea of when and what to shoot. I shot a couple of soccer games, but I played soccer for years back in high school, so again, I have an understanding of the flow of the game. Rugby is another matter entirely, I have never played rugby in my life, never watched a game, really only knew it existed and some friends of mine do it. I was kind of worried because I had no idea really what the important parts of the game were and what to anticipate.
I asked my friend to give me a quick primer, he said that probably I could get some good shots when the ball went out of bounds. Apparently the as they throw the ball back in, each team picks one guy to pretty much grab by the shorts and wedgie into the air to try and get the ball over the head of everyone else. After dispensing this nugget of advice he had to go coach and I was left to see what would happen. But he was right, frequent severe wedgies seem to be an integral part of the rugby experience.
Having watched and shot one game now, I am still no closer to actually understanding the game. It pretty much looked like an adult version of the game called "tackle the guy with the ball," that we used to play when I was a kid. I am sure the safety police have since outlawed that game, but basically someone tossed the ball into the crowd, someone was dumb enough to grab it and was instantly smashed by everyone else. That's pretty much my impression of the flow of rugby. Apparently instead of avoiding tackles, the guy with the ball is supposed to run into the other team and try to push through them, while his team is supposed to basically push him through them. Or in some cases, throw them through the other team.
I missed a lot of shots, because there aren't down or anything, so the game is mostly continuous. Except there seems to be a penalty of some sort every two seconds. Never really had any idea what they were or who it was even against. There were lots of these things that I think are called scrums, where basically everyone hugs and does a sort of strange dance around the ball.
Anyway, I went to the game, threw the 70-200mm onto Excalibur, slapped the combo onto a monopod and did what I could. Set up for cloudy white balance (it was cloudy). One thing I have learned is that auto WB works pretty well, but fixed WB makes for easier post processing of large groups of shots. I shoot raw so I can adjust the WB later to whatever I need later, but if they are all the same I can batch process if I need to. In this case I really didn't. I let the ISO roam in auto, set the shutter speed to 1/500 and the aperture to f8 because it was pretty bright. I found that with the dayglo uniforms I had to dial in a -1EV compensation to keep them from blowing out. 9 point AF-C tracked pretty well with a normal focus shift delay. Once I was dialed in I made sure to keep both eyes open, my finger on the back button focus, and followed the ball as best I could.
Overall, despite not having a clue what was going on and not getting all the shots I could, I am happy with how it turned out for a first try, and my friend loved them, so overall it was a success. And for the record, no pads. These guys are much tougher than those american "football" players.
As always, you can see the full gallery on my website. I have a busy weekend full of shooting coming up, so hopefully will have more updates next week, then it's back to Anza Borrego for another round of yoga/acro shoots, this time with 4WD!
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