Friday night was the first home game of the season at Dripping Springs High School and I was on duty as band photographer. Given that these early games kick off while it’s still light, I took the OM-D EM-1 mk II that the nice people at Olympus USA loaned me along with its amazing 300mm f/4 lens to try it out on the game in the first quarter. In decent light, that combination is an absolute monster – 10fps in “slow” continuous mode, amazingly fast autofocus (even if I haven’t yet quite figured out how to best tune it’s face detector to stop it jumping between players once I locked on to the quarterback) and a package that is about half the weight of my usual D500 setup.
From the sidelines, the 300mm lens (which feels like a 600mm on a full frame body) is actually too long. This picture was taken from behind the goal and the player was somewhere around the 30 to 40 yard line. Even half a field away, I couldn’t get more than a single figure in the shot. That said, how often do you ever hear photographers complaining that their lenses are too long? About as often as you hear them complaining about them being too fast or too sharp, I expect.
You’ll see more from this camera because I also used it on a photowalk we had on Saturday morning and I’ll be posting these for the remainder of the week.
For the technically inclined...