5 frames with a Canon AE-1, shooting a professional football (soccer) game

Back in May (2024), a friend invited me to the last home game of the season of our town’s football club, Vejle Boldklub, here in Denmark. This was an important match, since if they won this game, they would stay in the first division. If they lost, the risk of relegation into second division was very high.

Inspired by Miles Myerscough-Harris of the @expiredfilmclub Instagram account, who shoots professional sports events on film (and sometimes with expired film and/or particularly old cameras), I decided I would try to capture some shots at this game.

I wasn’t sure of the size of the stadium, how far away we’d be from the action, and what I would be able to capture even with the longest lens I have – but thought I would just try.

Choosing the right lens, camera, and film stock

The longest lens I have is an FD mount Sigma F/3.5-4.5 75-210mm, which came with my grandfather’s Canon AE-1. Going with the AE-1 would mean manual focus, which could be tricky for action shots – but then again, I assumed I would be far enough from the action that I’d be shooting at infinity anyway.

The alternative was to use my Canon EOS 300V with an EF 28-80mm lens – but I thought that would certainly be too short, and that the autofocus would be too slow anyway to add a lot of value.

I hadn’t much used this Sigma zoom lens since receiving my grandfather’s camera some 10 years ago, and certainly hadn’t used it in the past 4 years. Fortunately however, the lens appeared clean and serviceable, so I mounted it on my AE-1, and then considered what film to load.

The day was quite sunny, but I was going to shoot handheld at up to 200mm, so wanted to be able to shoot with a shutter speed of 1/250 at minimum (the Canon AE-1’s fastest shutter speed is 1/1000). I knew I wanted to shoot in colour, quickly dismissed Kodak Gold for being too slow, so hesitated between loading Lomo 800, or Kodak Ultramax. Thinking that Lomo 800 was overkill, I opted for Ultramax, loaded it, and took off to the stadium.

The shots

The stadium was small enough that we were really quite close from the field. The lens ended up being a great choice – while a bit too short to capture tighter shots at the other end of the pitch, it was more than enough for when the action was closer, and I ended up using the whole range of this zoom lens.

The player came on the pitch, the game was about to start; I took my camera out of my bag, and started shooting. Here are some of my favourite shots from the game:

I shot the whole roll and sent it over to my usual lab (CPH Lab in Copenhagen, www.cph-lab.dk) who developed and scanned. I was really excited to see the results, and very happy with the results. I think I was quite lucky with the lens and distance to the action combination – as it would have been too short and a bit underwhelming in a bigger stadium.

I’ll certainly do this again, and have been looking at getting another, longer lens to bring in addition to the 75-210mm.

Thanks for reading – and you can find me on Instragram for more!

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