I was invited to 2 Polo matches at Coworth Park in Royal Ascot, Berkshire. As a seasoned sports photographer, I packed my equipment and set out for an afternoon of Polo with my family.

Today I had my Canon 60d with the EF 100-400mm f/4.5–5.6L IS USM the frame rate is only 5 per second. The Canon 60d is not the fastest for sports but if you know what your doing you can anticipate your shot and use the burst rate well.

As it was family time, you can imagine I didn't pay too much attention to my equipment, having low batteries, full SD Cards or dirty Lens.

My tip to you is. After every job, make sure your camera bag and equipment is clean and ready to go. If you ignore this you will end up with photographs like this one below. This was also in a series of a 100 or so pictures.

Shooting with a big aperture may of got around this problem but in the very bright sunshine you will have to shoot with a smaller aperture to obtain a good exposure. The problem you have, is the 100-400mm has push and pull system, so you can pull dust into the lens. The dust sits behind the first element and with a small aperture the dust will show up in your photograph if you don't remove it. The only way I've found to clean this without returning it to Canon is pull it in and out quickly, the air forced into the lens seems to remove the dust. I would still recommend to send the lens away for a deep clean by Canon themselves.

In this series of 100 photographs I had to clean out well over 50 dust spots in each one. You can sync the clone stamp in Lightroom, sadly this method will not work if your photos are all different and in my case they were. As you can see a little time spend packing your equipment away clean will save you loads of time in post with your next photo shoot.

From now on my equipment goes away clean and is ready to go.

If your require further information or would like me to capture your day please call me on : + 44 (0) 7584 900938 or email me at neil@neilgrahamphotography.com