I had the opportunity to photograph an evening Oakville Soccer game at Pine Glen this past Monday!

The dim, flickering floodlights proved to be a true test of my camera equipment. My ISO was pushing 16000-20000 in order to retain a 1/1000th shutter speed at f/2.8. This was higher than I have ever required in the past!

To say the Canon 1DX Mark II performed well is an understatement. I took the following two steps to prepare:

• Turned on the anti-flicker setting. While this did reduce my camera speed to about twelve photos per second, it drastically improved my images by almost entirely eliminating the floodlight colour casts.
• Turned on automatic white balance, with ambience priority. This helped to ensure colour consistency from one spot on the field to another.

When I started taking photographs and breaking down what the camera was achieving, it was honestly quite incredible. The camera was releasing the shutter at the peak of the floodlight cycle, accurately matching white balance between each image, auto-focusing consistently on athletes, and simultaneously doing all of this while taking twelve photos per second.

Have a look at the results below!