[Tobers]

I was at the rugby union game at Twickenham against the Aussies which England lost to a much quicker and smarter Australian team. Shooting with a pair of Canon 1D Mk III bodies and variously a 300 2.8 with & without 1.4x extender, 70-200 2.8, 15mm 2.8, 24-105 f4, and a 580exII. I used a Lowepro belt kit & pouches to carry stuff around as I was mobile on the east touchline in the 2nd half. The big lens was on a Giottos monopod, and as ever I had my £1.99 folding stool for when I needed to sit down. In Av mode to start with as the light was variable across the pitch, I went to manual after about 20 mins as the light became more stable. Lighting at Twickenham is mainly from the sides which means it's better shooting from the sidelines (though I was at one of the ends for part of one half for those head-on shots). Also, the light from one side fades a bit when it gets to the opposite side of the pitch and there was about 2/3rds of a stop difference from left to right which made for a bit of tweaking in Lightroom. I was usually at 2.8 with ISO starting around 640 going up to 1600 to keep the shutter above 1/800th.

Interestingly (to me anyway) I was shooting not for the papers this time, but one of the major sponsors and the RFU. This meant I had a very long brief of shots I had to get that had little to do with sports action, but a lot to do with advertisers banners etc. However, it did mean I didn't have to edit, caption & send pics in real time which was nice, and I was able to move around the east side up & down the pitch. However, I'm a bit annoyed as the two page spread in the Sunday Times is a shot very much like one that I have, and a lot of Monday papers have very good coverage with 3 or 4 shots almost identical to mine, but c'est la vie. With 55 photographers there's bound to be a load of similar pictures out there.

#1 Lewis Moody and I think it's Drew Mitchell.

#2 Wilko's first drop goal in the opening few minutes. To say the crowd went bonkers is an understatement. He played superbly and outclassed the majority of players on the field.

#3 Hmmmm...must try harder next weekend

#4 Sun setting on Martin Johnson's managerial career? Also fulfilled my ambition to shoot action sports with a 15mm fisheye :D

#5 Borthwick wins another lineout - if England did one thing well it was their lineout play which was superb.

#6 Wilko flicks out a backhand pass begore getting tackled by Peter Hynes. If you watched on telly this was the follow-up to his little chip and run move - very slick.

#7 Dylan Hartley tackled by a grimacing Benn Robinson

#8 Ayoola Erinle is all eyes here

#9 Aussies lift the trophy.

Argentina on Saturday - we really should win that one!

Tobers

My sports photography Flickr

[mmayson]

They are all fantastic Gorgeous set of photos, well done!

[Martin.D]

Yes nice set - tell me, how many shot's on average do you take for such an event?

[Tobers]

Hi - I had 798 shots from Saturday, half of which were non-game related (promo stuff for a corporate client). Out of that lot, I had 200 "keepers" of which about 45 were of the rugby action itself. I'm quite ruthless about editing - no point keeping imperfect stuff and it only makes captioning and keywording a pain, so I usually reckon on 10% of game shots worthy of keeping and maybe 1% being portfolio-worthy if that.

Getty had about 300 pics on their site from the game from their 4 photographers plus several other AP photographers.

[Holowlegs]

Hello there


You really are getting very good at this Andy.

Another top set, and I think maybe your best so far.

Love the action shots, especially #1

Also a great portrait of Martin Johnson


Cheers Holo

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

Really like those first two...nice

[tonkie]

Love your explanation of the event nearly as much as your shots