Photograph waterpolo at the Vaudoise Arena? Yes of course I can I thought to myself. A quick search of the internet and check on rules and the length of a match and any tips that might help before heading out.
The gear in the bag was Nikon Z9 with 24-120 F4 and 70-200 F2.8 and 1.4x converter in case I needed more reach as not knowing the venue I didn’t know how close I could get. Would the F4 lens allow fast enough shutter speed without compromising the ISO? That would depend on the lighting at the pool.
I quickly tried a few test shots and realised the lighting was bad enough that it was pushing the ISO on my Z9 to 6400. The noise is acceptable but I really need it to be lower so I took the teleconverter off and used just the 70-200 f2.8
Shooting at 15 frames/second allowed me to capture the action but I soon realised as this was a sport I wasn’t familiar with I had trouble capturing the ball in flight or just as it was thrown, predicting when the action would happen was now the challenge.
So I enabled the Z9’s pre capture option and set it to 0.5s. It would mean more images as minimum capture speed is 30 frames a second full resolution jpgs so editing would need to be selective but if I could capture the movement freezing the water spray the additional work would be worth it.
So let me know what you think of the images, I was lucky enough to be pool side this time so the 70-200 worked great. I look forward to the next and maybe changing tact as the water spray from low down pool side often hides the players as well.