Christopher Dawson, taking aim.
Yep, its Polo season again out on the North Shore. This was the second day of the season I’ve shot out there, I try to go out a few times a month to shoot the action and get my dose of socializing.
I was stretching myself this day. After 12+ years shooting polo I have gotten comfortable in what I shoot and how I shoot it, mostly with my trusty Nikkor 400mm f/2.8 Ais ED-IF, a manual focus lens, sometimes with the TC-14b attached, which makes it close to a 600mm f/4 lens, (actually a 560mm). I enjoy manually focusing on the swiftly moving action, and throughout the years I’ve gotten skilled at tracking the horses in action.
On this outing I thought I’d try something different, and brought the 600mm f/4 AF-S VR lens and attached the TC-17e, making it a 1000mm autofocus lens. Coupled with the Nikon D700, it made a formidable sight on the sidelines. Using such a long lens was very challenging, most of which was setting up the camera to do what I hoped I wanted it to do when I wanted it to do it. The addition of the TC-17e teleconverter dropped the maximum aperture of the lens combination to 6.1, which was 1/3 stop off of what Nikon recommends for accurate autofocus. Even though it was fairly bright out, the camera seemed to be having a hard time locking on to the action, perhaps due to the relatively low contrast of the horses. I adjusted the camera’s settings, changing the parameters of the AF system to see if I could tweak it so that would improve. After a few chukkas’ shooting with the 1000mm I took off the teleconverter and just shot with it as a 600mm, and the AF performance improved in accuracy and performance. All in all, I learned a lot about what the modern AF camera can and cannot do, and gained valuable insight on the subtle adjustments available to maximize performance.
This was one of the better shots of the day, shot with the 1000mm set-up. Polo players really like photos that show them at the start of the stroke, and if you get the horses hooves off the ground they like that as well.
