This was a pleasant surprise!

Our local papers don't usually run photos from mid-week football matches because they're on Wednesday evenings, so they're too late for deadline. But last week's match had been moved from Wednesday to Monday so the skycam goal pic made it into the paper, large and in colour on the back page.

However that left the paper with a problem: No match report except the brief details I sent myself. So instead they wrote about the photo itself! Here's the shot again with the paper's write-up…

Football skycam
This is how one of Balintore's five goals scored against Ross-shire Club in the Welfare League might have looked to a passing seagull.

It was captured by photographer Andrew Smith who, in pursuit of something a little different, set up a remote-controlled camera atop a 12-ft monopod. His arresting image shows how Ross-shire Club goalkeeper David Mitchell, unprepared as his sight was blocked by one of his own defenders, could then only watch as a thunderbolt from Balintore's Graeme Davis hit the net during the Welfare League game on Monday this week.

(No I don't really have a "12-ft monopod". it was a 6-ft monopod that I held up in the air, putting the camera about 12-ft off the ground.)