Sports

Here are the team photos from Wednesday's under-13s and under-15s football matches between Tain Royal Academy and Peterhead Academy. There's no photo of the Tain under-15s team as the teacher in charge didn't want one taken.

Tain under-13s:

Peterhead under-13s:

Peterhead under-15s:

Photos from Saturday's semi-final between Balintore and Golspie, which saw Golspie make it through to the final after a late penalty. A frustrating game for photos as it was very scrappy and stop-start, not a lot of clean action.

Highlight was the dog that joined in during the second half!

I'm trying to track down the dog and its owner for a little story the paper wants to do, so if anyone knows who they are then please call me on 01862 832 588 or leave a comment on this blog entry. Both of those options are preferable to e-mail as I get a huge amount of spam and there's always a chance that I could miss your message.

And while I'm putting out personal appeals, this will no doubt have Jean screaming at me in embarrassment but can anyone volunteer to sell the raffle tickets during the first half of Balintore home games? It only takes about 15 mins, just before half-time. I sell them before the match but Jean ends up doing the rest which means she misses part of the game, hardly fair considering all the work she does for the club. If you can help then see me or Jean or Beth or any other committee member, we're usually there at least an hour before kick-off. Thanks!

Yesterday I had my first opportunity to practice shooting basketball and swimming, covering a Tain Academy senior boys basketball game, and later a Tain Swimming Club training session. And I did okay for a first attempt!

The main thing I learned about shooting basketball is not to forget that you're using a sync lead for your main strobe! I've never used a sync lead before but I had to yesterday as I was using my wireless triggers for a remote camera. Just after the game had started I had to dash over to adjust the slave strobe and I forgot that the camera I was holding was wired to the main strobe. So down it came, a 6-foot drop onto an unforgiving gym floor. The reflector got squished but amazingly the strobe worked fine for the rest of the game.

I also learned that it's true what they say about basketball remotes: You're very unlikely to get a good shot. I'll admit that I was a bit arrogant and expected to get maybe half a dozen winners, but no, not a single one. Total rubbish.

Anyway, shooting basketball is as much fun as I expected, so I want to do a lot more of it. Next chance I'll get is next week when I've been invited back to cover an inter-schools game.

Swimming was harder than I expected. It had never occurred to me that the biggest challenge would be focussing as, of course, swimmers are under the water a lot of the time so you can't focus track them. I got the hang of it though. You can cheat and shoot from the side of the pool, prefocussed on a certain lane. But I did do some head-on shots too and it's just a matter of precisely following the water disturbance and then locking on as soon as the person's head comes out of the water.

I had to shoot at ISO 3200 to get 1/500s at f/2.8 so the image quality was lousy. I did a custom white balance with the Expodisc but I still had to do a bit of colour correction in processing. 

And I've just realised that I haven't included any of the more dramatic head-on shots in this little set. Ah well, I think these were the best shots from the session.

At the start of last week I was planning to head down to Glasgow to photograph the Celtic Connections concert that I mentioned previously, but the Royal Concert Hall wouldn't budge on their half-hour photo policy so I had to scrap that idea. (Turning down national news coverage on the day that Celtic Connections announced a £15,000 grant for "market research" to gauge public interest. Hmm.)

Then I arranged to go and cover the Ross County match, away to Clyde, but it turned out that the team bus was leaving early due to the bad weather and I couldn't get to Dingwall in time to catch it, so that'll have to wait until another week.

Thankfully it was a good weekend for local football so I thought I'd try something that I've never done before, that being to cover two matches. Not easy if you don't drive! But the bus got me into Invergordon a quarter of an hour before their match against Dornoch, giving me just enough time to get up to the pitch and grab photos of the team sheets before the match started. I shot about 35 minutes of that match…

…before dashing back down into town to catch the bus over to Alness, which got me there in time for the second half of their match against Golspie.

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.