Chesapeake

Thanks to Hurricane Helene’s tracking, and the upcoming rains we were expecting on Friday, we had a football game on Thursday night. It was Military Appreciation night as the Hickory Hawks hosted their rival, the Great Bridge Wilcats.

The combination of high school stadium lighting, dark open spaces between the two sides of the stadium, and Hickory’s all black jerseys, make for a difficult night of shooting. It gets so dark out there. Even shooting wide open at f/2.8 on the 400mm lens, my ISOs were reaching my peak settings. Lets hope these schools can switch out to LED lights in the near future.

I made it out to Colon L. Hall stadium in Great Bridge for the Friday night high school football game between the Oscar Smith Tigers and the Great Bridge Wildcats. Great Bridge’s stadium had undergone renovations and it was finally complete. I have to say the stadium looks really good now. I want to say it was originally built in 1962. Made completely out of cinder blocks and concrete, it had suffered from neglect and black mold for years. They gutted and ripped out a lot of the back wall and replaced it with steel beams.

I shot my first high school football game of the season on August 29th. The game featured the home team Deep Creek Hornets of Chesapeake, Virginia and the visiting Currituck County Knights of Barco, North Carolina.

Having just received my “new” Nikon 400mm f/2.8G ED VR lens a day earlier, I was eager to try it out and since it was Labor Day Weekend coming up, most of the high school football games would be played on Thursday. Deep Creek High is not too far from my house, so I decided to go there and shoot. Did I mention I shoot for MaxPreps too? The gallery from this game is on both MaxPreps and my own site.

As my film journey progresses, I absolutely love the simplicity of shooting with my Nikon FM2n and Yashica Electro 35 GSN. But I have been thinking about getting into medium format at some point. I’ve really had my eye on finding another Yashica. Especially the Mat 124G. But then I was watching Youtube and and I saw Kai’s video on using the Nikon F6.

Watching his video got me thinking. I have the Nikon FM2n. The perfect, most simplistic 35mm SLR made by Nikon. It doesn’t even need a battery to function. But what if I paired it up with the most advanced 35mm SLR Nikon ever made? That would be an awesome complement to the FM2n.