HS Football

Thursday night football.  The Ralston Valley Mustangs were looking to rebound from last weeks cross town rivalry loss to Pomona with another cross town rivalry game against the Arvada West Wildcats.  And bounce back they did.  With a 22 point second quarter, the Mustangs destroyed the visiting Wildcats 41-14.

This was a cold night in Arvada. At one point in the game, it was right around freezing.  By the end of the game, even with my cold weather Iditarod gloves on, my fingers were numb.  Thankfully, here in Colorado, unlike Alaska, the next night it can be in the 50’s or even the 60’s.

I thought I would take this post to talk about the use of flash for high school football.  Let me be the first to say, I hate it, and I love it.  If I had my choice, I would never use flash for football.  You give up the ability to use your cameras full potential.  Shooting a sport like football really needs a good FPS rate.  FPS, frames per second, can mean the difference in getting the ball in the air or hitting the fingertips of the receiver.  When you shoot off a burst of 3 or 4 shots on a play you lessen the chance of the player blinking when you take the photo, or at least getting one shot of the series that they have their eyes open.  When you use flash, you introduce harsh shadows, potentially adding more work with red eye, and you are forced to shoot at one frame per second to allow your flash to recycle and to keep your flash from overheating or burning up.  You can add an external battery pack to help your flash recycle faster, and that could allow you to shoot up to three frames per second, but that should be done in short, controlled bursts.  Ok.  So that is what I do not like about it.  What I do like about it is being able to go into a dark, high school stadium and instead of shooting at ISO 3200 or even 6400 or higher, I can go in and shoot at ISO 800 for much cleaner images.  By mounting my flash low on my monopod, I can somewhat reduce the chance of red-eye, and I can light the inside of the players helmet which can be even more of a black hole than the stadiums themselves.  If I could afford a 1D X camera, I could reduce the time I need to use a flash for HS Football, but unfortunately, I am stuck with it for now.

Here is my 10 Shot from the game.

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