One Love ... and one fascination

There are two things that keep me coming back to photography: one is a simple love of people-photography.

The other is a fascination with selective focus, the use of controlled depth of field to capture some parts of a image in sharp focus and blur other parts to the point where they only hint at their contents.

Here, I was shooting one of my local youth football teams, when a stoppage in play presented me with this shot; I used the same settings (an action freezing high shutter speed coupled with a wide aperture) to shoot this as I'd been using to capture the play moments before.

What I like about this shot is the contrast of the player's red shirt against the greens of the field and the opposing goalie's shirt, and the way that you can almost feel the goalie being sized up.

One thing to notice about this shot is that the aperture I used is in the range that a relatively low cost telephoto zoom like the Nikon AF-S VR 70-300 f/4.5-5.6G can be used at ... which means that you don't need professional level equipment to get this kind of image if most of your photography is done outside, in bright light.

The technical bit:
Focal length: 300mm
Aperture: f5.6
Shutter speed: 1/2000 second
Sensitivity: ASA / ISO 400

One Love, by the way, is a song by the late, great, Bob Marley.