Canon by a Nikon man

By Matt Gore - Photographer, iconphotos


Once again our great friends at Carnegie commissioned icon to shoot this years Challenge cup final at Wembley, London. This was the 4th straight year we have been part of this fantastic event.


Icon staff photographers me (Matt Gore) and Vicky Matthers were shooting,  I normally shoot on a Nikon D3 hiring in a Nikon 400mm 2.8 from Calumet drummond street to cover the action but as the weekend fell on a bank holiday, and the fact that icon are based out in leatherhead, Surrey, Calumet couldn't get the lens to me and picked up within a reasonable budget. Vicky and I hatched a plan and I ended up hiring a Canon EOS 1d mk 4 and a Canon 600mm F4 lens from Flash centre, leeds. 


Vicky picked up the lens and camera along with a Canon TS-E 17mm f/4 L lens as she travelled from our leeds office to Wembley in North London. We wanted the tilt/shift for some feature crowd shots and some atmospherics, see portrait of 'Matthers' shot as we worked out which end we wanted (I wanted the wembley way end...I muttered something to do with the light but in reality it's right next to the photographers room and at half time I could nip in and grab a coffee and a kit-kat) 

I have been a Nikon user for most of my career and have enjoyed trash talking Canon whenever I have had the chance but this camera was mind blowing! Coupled with the awesome 600mm you can't seem to miss. I had an age between the coverage the 600mm gave me and switching to my Nikon 135mm F2 for tries and celebrations. This is a real bonus as the technique of spinning any monopod mounted sports lens onto your shoulder while you desparately pick up your 'shorty' often involves a crisp blow to the back of the head...not appriciated if you happen to be covering a cold mid week football in Barnsley I can tell you!


I won't be trading in all my Nikon kit just yet, the flash system is way too intuitive, I would be lost without my arsenal of SB800's and 900's (more on the extensive use of off camera flash in future posts) but I can see this is an astonishing camera. As icon will now be offering HD video services to complement our stills work I will be off to order a 5d mk2 soon.


Posted are some of the images, hope you like them, Aussie Chris Hicks scored a Hatrick of tries right in front of me and I could have practically given him a high five on every one of them he celebrated that close to me! Leeds took a pounding losing to Warrington 30 - 6 and even that solitary try looked shaky as I'm sure it was a forward pass(?)

  

I never really like these trophy presentation images but you have to get them, 600mm was a neat focal length for this as well.


I have included a screen shot from aperture 3.0 as I edited the images down for this entry. I'll post in the future on my use of raw conversion software and my current digital workflow. It shows the camera data on the left for the picture of Vicky shot on the canon 17mm tilt shift.