In my last post I tried to illustrate how the low light levels at most poker tournaments will affect your exposure and some of the problems this can cause. Continuing that series, in this post, I’ll cover one of the ways you can increase your likelihood of getting an acceptable shot.

This is the obvious one – if shooting with f/2.8 zooms  is still giving you shutter speeds slower than you’re comfortable with you could move to quick prime glass.

Canon 200mm f/2

I used to be a Canon guy and used the 17-55 f/2.8 IS (on a 50D), 24-70 f/2.8 L (on a 5D and 5D Mk II) and 70-200 f/2.8 L IS lenses – basically Canon’s flagship zooms (at a combined cost of just under £4,000 as I write this). Canon gives you the option of moving to some ultra-quick primes. I’m not a prime kind of guy but I could see the attraction in shooting their 50mm f/1.2 L, 85mm f/1.2 L and 135 f/2 L (combined cost of just over £4,000). Hell, if money was no object you could even add Canon’s amazing 200mm f/2 (pictured, £4,800) to your collection. :)

You’d miss a bit at the wide end but you should be ok with a slower zoom here (camera shake is less of an issue at wider focal-lengths) so I’d add maybe the 17-40 f/4 L (about £620) to the bag.

Those of us on Nikon don’t have the luxury of f/1.2 primes so we must content ourselves with the alphabet-soup of the 50mm f/1.4 AF-S G, 85mm f/1.4 AF D and maybe the 135mm f/2 DC AF D (total of about £2,200) leaving us plenty of money to add the perplexingly named 16-35mm f/4 AF-S ED VR G for about £900.

Buy any of these lenses and you’ll have yourself some really, really nice glass. From f/2.8 you are now at f/1.4 – an increase of two stops. Suddenly your 1/60th @ f/2.8 ISO 2500 can be a much more manageable 1/125th @ f/1.4 ISO 1250 (I’ve swapped one stop in aperture and one stop in ISO here).

There are other benefits too: most modern cameras keep the lens wide-open when composing and focusing to keep the view-finder as bright as possible. They only stop down to the shooting aperture (if required) when you press the shutter. If a camera is going to struggle to get focus anywhere, it’s going to be where it’s dark. The brighter you can make the scene, the more accurately the camera can focus.

But with the speed comes another ‘problem’; depth of field. The wider our aperture gets, the shallower the portion of our scene which is acceptably sharp. This means your focus needs to be spot on. Be prepared also for your pics to look a bit weird. I mean, who needs razor thin DOF for poker portraiture?

Equally, if you’re shooting a commission for a commercial outfit they’ll want their branding in acceptable focus so, after all, maybe f/1.4 glass isn’t right.

Finally, fixed-focal-length glass will make shooting in crowded poker-rooms much more difficult because now you’re zooming with your feet. You might find yourself changing lenses more often unless you have a second body (you should have a backup regardless. You do have a backup, don’t you?)

What’s in my bag? As I mentioned above, I’m not a big prime-lens player so I carry Nikon’s trio of fast-zooms:

Nikon's 'Holy Trinity': (left-to-right) 70-200 f/2.8 VR II, 24-70 f/2.8, 14-24 f/2.8