Archive for January, 2007

One of my many New Year resolutions is that I'm going to make it or break it as a photographer doing things the way I want to do them, not how other people do them. It's easy to fail in this business but I think it's better to do something your own way and either hit the big time or fail, rather than scraping through trying to be just like everyone else.

My reason for getting into photography was a decision to move from written journalism to photo journalism. Naively I thought I'd be able to do regular news coverage for the local papers but that hasn't happened, partly because there ain't much to cover and partly because there are lots of other guys already doing it. The solution to that problem is to find and cover local-interest stories independently, and that's something I'll be exploring this year, but in the meantime there is one area of news that I do regularly cover for the papers: Football.

Yes, football is news. All sport events should be regarded as news. But coverage of them has become quite formulaic, with a lot of newspapers deciding that the only interesting photo from a football match is an action photo, a goal celebration, or a basic shot of a new signing. And as much as I like those photos, they really aren't journalism according to my understanding of the word.

The way I want to see a football match covered is as a human interest story. The majority of people don't care about who kicked a ball at a particular moment and who was trying to stop them, which is all most action shots can show you. I think people care about other people, what the game means to them, how exciting or heartbreaking a goal is, who's the loudmouth that gets booked all the time and who's the disciplined one that just goes to work and scores goals. You don't need photographs to tell you who did what and when, that's what the match report is for. The photos should show you what it meant to the people who were there.

So after that grandiose introduction, here's what I came up with from today's league game between Balintore and Inverness City, which Balintore won 5-1. The first obvious thing to do was to take lots of photos of Inverness manager Stevie Graham who was frequently animated throughout the game.

More challenging was to get good photos of Balintore caretaker manager Gordy Lowe, who rarely shows much emotion during a game. For most of the game I had to keep one eye on the action and one eye on Gordy, and eventually I got two decent shots. It was a happy coincidence that both times I was able to get another player in the background.

I'd arranged in advance that if Balintore won the game I'd go and get a celebration shot in the changing room after the game. You see a lot of shots like that from American football games but rarely from any UK sports. Before the match I went in to get all the light readings and everything done and I ended up taking some shots of the pre-game team talk, so I went back in at half-time and took shots of the team talk then too. None of those shots are real hit-you-in-the-face WOW shots but they're good enough that I know I want to do team talk shots in future. I expect it's one of those things that you have to keep doing every game and maybe once every few months you'll get a shot that's worth publishing, buf if that's what it takes then that's what it takes, so long as the teams don't mind. Anyway here's the celebration shot from after the match. It's nothing like the intense shot I wanted, which would have needed everyone to get much closer in so they were practically climbing on top of each other, but it is what it is.

And finally a shot of the match sponsors. Not done for the paper, they just asked me to do a photo of them all together, old friends etc. Jean had only come into the room to let them know that it was time to leave, and about three seconds after the picture was taken she was busily booting them out!

Next match I'll use the 2x teleconverter and shoot at 600mm. This will allow me to get manager shots from further away (so they aren't aware of me watching them all the time!) and I'll be able to start picking out reaction shots of individual players. The converter will drop the 300mm f/2.8 down to f/5.6 but that should be okay for the kind of shots I want as there won't be a lot of movement.

If I get chance over the next few days then I'll post some of the team talk shots from today's match. I think they'll look pretty good as grainy black & whites but I haven't processed them yet.