Ballymena Rugby Under Lights and Ballyclare Win on the Road

Thursday night’s game was at Deramore Park for Ballymena’s 1st XV playing Belfast Harlequins. Difficult to photograph under lights, especially at the spread of the light was uneven across the pitch. I photographed the game mostly using my 300mm f2.8 which let enough light in to get some good close-up images for the team.

The game was a tight affair in which Ballymena emerged as winners with a final score of 21-24.

Ballymena’s Roshan Weerarathne

Ballyclare’s Jack Gamble scoring between the posts

The second game of the week was away to City of Derry Rugby Club where Ballyclare bossed the game from beginning to end with a final score of 19 - 61. For this game, I decided to use one camera and one lens, I used my Canon R6 with a 70 - 300 f4 - 5.6 L. This is one of my favourite lenses as it works so well on the R6. I also decided that I would use live tracking for the whole game which surprisingly worked incredibly well with only a few missed shots. I’m going to experiment in the coming week using this mode of auto-focus to see if it will work with my main lens the 400mm f2.8. I also used electronic shutter mode, the keen-eyed photographers among my readers will note the rolling shutter effect on the rugby posts as I panned my camera with Jack’s run.

I have also started a new website that is a portfolio type of site using Squarespace. I’m hoping that this will raise my profile a little and let people see the range of photographic services that I offer while my main focus will remain sports-orientated. I also signed up with Linktree for much the same reason, so far so good.

My favourite photo from the day.