Sports

Very pleased to see that the pic of the Inverness scissor kick goal made it into this week's Ross-shire Journal, quite large and in colour on the back page. And the Northern Times used the first of these pics with some of the Golspie lads after their first goal. The second pic was after the second goal.

There are three football shots that I've always wanted to get. One is a netcam shot of a goal and I've now had a few of those. Another is a netcam shot from inside the goal with the keeper diving towards the remote-controlled camera but I haven't figured out how to do that safely yet. And the third is a shot of a goal being scored from a scissor kick, which I finally got today.

Covering a lot of Balintore matches, I've had plenty of opportunity to catch one of Euan Dance's scissor kicks as he does them quite often, but I usually shoot from the goal line to catch the midfield action so I'm at the wrong angle for the goal mouth.

The shot I got today shows Gavin Nicolson of Inverness scoring the first goal in his team's victory over Golspie in the Football Times Cup final.

In theory that's close to being the "decisive moment" because it was taken just after he'd kicked the ball, but I actually prefer this shot taken just before, mainly because Gavin's eyes are open and he's still on his way up.

I'll just send both to the paper and leave it up to them to choose. Should be in next week's North Star if you want to look out for it.

Not a great haul from today's match which Alness won 5-0 at home against Bunillidh. For part of the second half I was experimenting with a new idea so my mind wasn't on the action, but the rest of the time I was giving it 100% and simply not getting the shots. I really need to do better than this if I'm going to do the bigger sports jobs. Best 'story' pic in my opinion is the top-right one as it sums up the match, which was dominated by Alness.

A recent Sports Shooter article introduced me to the low-angle American football shots being produced by Sports Illustrated staff photographer Peter Read Miller.

I was blown away by Peter's work so I committed the first half of today's Balintore vs Thurso game to shooting from a low angle with a 70-200 lens, mostly kneeling behind a goal and poking the lens through the net. (They let you do nearly anything at these games! Just wait until I get my radio controlled helicopter…)

The low angle does succeed in making pictures more dramatic but overall I don't think it works very well for football action. I definitely want to try it for rugby sometime though.

That said, the experiment did produce one good shot… 

Towards the end of the first half Balintore was awarded a penalty so I raced back around to behind the Thurso goal, knelt down and motored off a few shots as captain John Skinner netted his team's only goal of the game. I'd had so little time to focus that I was sure all of the shots would be soft but somehow the focus had locked and the shots were nice and sharp.

I've had one vaguely good behind-the-goal shot before (done with a remote) but nothing I wanted to put in the paper. I'll be sending this one in though.

Any football fans reading? Post a comment to let me know what you think of this shot compared to the standard midfield action we usually see in the papers.

Click the picture to see a larger version on my Sports Shooter page.

3 March 2007: Balintore captain John Skinner converts from the penalty spot to score his team's only goal in a home league game against Thurso.

Here are some more action shots from Saturday's match. Not the greatest action but I wanted to give the papers a few more verticals to choose from.