Will it blend?

They've had appointments for weeks and suddenly there's a friendly match against the friendly club from the Weser... So I was just entering the stadium when a horde of happy children came running towards me. A very interesting time to be in the player tunnel. So of course I have all the wonderful expressions of sympathy and support from the best club for ex-players Naki lost. A pity.

Ultimately, it was an entertaining test match in which several players were able to show what they can do with the ball in front of a larger audience. I was particularly happy for Rosin and Litka.

Kung Fu insert

duel

Dennis Rosin in a duel

Litka scores 1-0

Marvin Ducksch has the score 2-0

Movement study by Maurice Litka

Everyone involved knows what is coming

and that's what happens.

Irwin Pfeiffer in the Fafa Picault jersey

Assistant coaches evaluate the game

Fin says hello at the end of the game

However, test games are generally rather unexciting from a photographic perspective. That's why I simply took the word test game literally and tested it myself. Namely, whether the autofocus of the new Nikon AF-S 105mm f/1.4 is fast enough to keep up with fast movements. After all, Nikon's new light monster is more of a portrait lens than a sports lens. And the lenses with such a large open aperture certainly have their problems because they are not designed for this and the narrow focus range ruthlessly exposes any malfunction.

Conclusion: surprisingly good! At least with the very good and very fast autofocus of the Nikon D500. I hardly had any failures.

However, 105mm is not a real sports focal length for a football field. Given the focal length, you can only reasonably work in the penalty area. That's why I took fewer pictures overall than I've ever taken at a football game. And in between I sat around uselessly for 10 minutes. But I was wide awake again for Mr. Litka's shot on goal.

Here are the pictures from the 105 on a D500 - some badly cropped, but all with an open aperture. The images look a little more like noise than they should. Unfortunately it was drizzling the whole time. Given the short exposure times required, it looks a bit unsightly. But even at 1/1600s, motion blur can quickly be seen. The D500 has 20 million pixels on the small APS-C sensor and they make movement clearly visible. In analog times I was still sitting on the sidelines with an exposure time of 1/250s. Well, the print image in the newspapers wasn't that good either...