Non-league football action with the Canon EOS R3

When sports photographer Molly Darlington was commissioned to photograph non-league football club 1874 Northwich FC in Cheshire, England, it was an opportunity for the former Canon Ambassador to return to her roots. "It's where I began taking pictures," she reminisces. "I originally started photographing the team when I was 16, during my first year of college. I then spent the next three or four years following them, both home and away, while I studied photography at A-level and at university, so it was nice to go back."

Despite taking a step back in time for this shoot, Molly brought a camera that breaks new ground: the Canon EOS R3. "I didn't know what to expect because I haven't used a mirrorless camera before, but I was really impressed by it," she says. "I normally use the Canon EOS-1D X Mark III, and I could customise the EOS R3 in a similar way. It's definitely lighter to carry though."

Molly had a single RF lens for this job – the Canon RF 70-200mm F2.8L IS USM – and used a Canon EF 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM (now succeeded by the Canon EF 400mm f/2.8L IS III USM for the longer shots, which was attached to the EOS R3 via a Control Ring Mount Adapter EF-EOS R. She added a Canon Extender EF 1.4x (now succeeded by the Canon Extender EF 1.4x III) for more reach when shooting candid portraits of the team's manager from across the pitch. "I didn't know if I'd be able to use both the adapter and the extender at the same time," Molly reveals. "But there was no change in the camera's performance."

Taking photos at a non-league football match brings a set of distinct challenges compared with covering English Premier League games, Molly says. "Pretty much all the Premier League clubs now have good quality LED lighting, whereas with a non-league club you can be dealing with floodlights that aren't very strong or which sometimes have a yellow hue to them.

"Then there's the background," she continues. "At a Premier League ground, you have a full stadium behind the players – at least you did pre-Covid – which you can blur using a large aperture to make the teams stand out. But at a non-league ground, you have barriers, fences and houses fighting for attention.

"Being able to shoot at 30fps will certainly come in handy for taking picture of animated managers who are jumping up and down, shouting and screaming," Molly adds. "It will improve your chances of getting a frame where they don't have their eyes closed or they're not pulling a funny face."

A feature of the Canon EOS R3 that Molly appreciated while photographing 1874 Northwich FC‘s management team was the camera's accurate, fast people tracking AF. "The face tracking, and in particular the eye tracking, performed really well, and it was quite easy to shift focus between the manager and the co-manager," she says. "Even with the 1.4x extender on my 400mm lens, the camera was still more than happy to move between the two sets of eyes.

The Canon EOS R3's brilliant autofocus and unrelenting speed might grab the headlines, but there are more than 100 'under the hood' updates from the EOS R5 that make it the perfect tool for sports photographers like Molly. The faster display start-up time means that the camera is ready to shoot more quickly, for example, while a lower shutter release lag time of just 20 milliseconds makes it that much easier to capture decisive moments in a game.

Then there are the practical enhancements that made it so effortless for Molly to slot the EOS R3 into her professional workflow, alongside her brace of EOS-1D X Mark IIIs, such as the shared Battery Pack LP-19 and the ability to transfer network settings between the cameras. "While you can copy a range of EOS-1D X Mark III settings onto a CFexpress card and then transfer those to the EOS R3, the most useful ones are the FTP settings because they can be a real pain to set up," says Molly.

In the end, the similarities in handling between the Canon EOS R3 and the EOS-1D X Mark III meant that it didn't take long for Molly to get up to speed with the new camera. Even switching to an electronic viewfinder wasn't that much of a leap.

"Most of the time I didn't really notice that I was actually shooting on an electronic viewfinder," Molly says. "Some people have said to me that they've really noticed a change when moving to an EVF from an optical viewfinder, but I couldn't say I noticed much of a difference at all.

"Overall, the camera felt robust and sturdy, and very similar to the Canon EOS-1D X Mark III," Molly concludes. “It's definitely a camera I can see myself using full-time in the future. I think we'll all end up shooting on mirrorless cameras sooner rather than later."

¹ When used with an f/1.2 lens (except lenses with a Defocus Smoothing (DS) coating), centre point AF, One-Shot mode at room temperature and ISO100.