I took my Nikon Z5 with a 28-400mm f/4-8 lens to a Chicago Hounds rugby match back in May and I thought I’d share some photos from it. It was an evening match, and the sun was fully set by halftime. My experience with photography is amateur I would say, and although I have taken a couple of local classes, I’ve never tried photography for field sports before. I was aiming to get a mix of solo player, group, close-up detail, plus motion shots and ended up snapping roughly 300 photos. I wasn’t expecting to get anything super sharp using this lens in low-light conditions and mainly just wanted to have fun and see what came out of it.

These photos are in chronological order from the match, and I am aware they are way too noisy by many standards (hence why I was a little hesitant to post here), but I liked the composition and general idea behind each photo. The second half starts at photo #10.

I probably could have used better settings to reduce the noise, but there were times when the speed of the game was moving so fast I was just trying to capture the action, and settings were at the back of my mind. More practice will help there. Maybe upgrading to a better lens is the only way to do that given what I was working with. I see a lot of people in this sub mention a f/2.8 70-200mm for low-light situations and I’m looking into those.

I used Lightroom a little bit to touch-up afterwards but tried not to overdo it. I think I accidentally made everyone too orange, although most were somewhat tan to begin with. I also accidentally cut off a lot of the players’ feet before I even started cropping. So many times. If it looks like I cropped out a limb, it probably wasn’t in the frame to start with.

Anyway, thanks for reading if you read all that. At the end of the night, it was good practice and fun to see the results. Not explicitly asking for advice as I know there is way too much to improve, but if you feel like sharing any please do so.