'Tis The Season...

It's now well into September, and I've been remiss in my postings - I've not posted in over a fortnight, and there are only two reasons for that: it's the start of the new academic year, and it's the start of the hockey season. In terms of photography, it's the latter which has had me indulging in more shutterbuggery than usual (it's a word, trust me)...

Things have changed considerably in the Phoenix Photography department. Firstly, we have said "fare thee well" to my bench buddy Lauren Freeman, who has taken up a position with the Sheffield Steeldogs (photographing, not playing!). Shooting alongside Lauren last season was a tremedously fun experience, she's a very talented snapper and I wish her well in her new job.



Secondly, the policy on photo distribution has been tightened, and as a result my photos of the Phoenix are now published on the team website and also via the newly created Official Phoenix Flickr Page. But I still get to post some of them on here, which can't be all bad!

The weekend of the 17th and 18th September saw myself, Yol and Vicki clocking up some serious mileage as the Phoenix took on the Steeldogs in the annual home-and-away War Of The Roses pre-season 'friendly' tournament. The away leg in Sheffield was first, so I had the joy of shooting through the netting again.



The game itself was a corker! For a friendly, it was one of the least friendly games I've seen in years. If the Phoenix play the whole season with the passion and fire that they showed in that game, we're in for a treat! From a photographer's perspective, the Sheffield home rink presents plenty of challenges, not just the netting but also the different colour tints to the lighting - one end of the rink has a green tint, the other end a red tint! It makes colour balancing the shots a challenge and a half!




Sunday night was the home leg, back on familiar territory, back on the Phoenix bench for the warm-up and back in the stands for the game!




I'm not just saying this because it's our home rink, but the lighting is so much better at the Altrincham Ice Dome than at any other rink I've shot at. It has its faults, it's not evenly illuminated throughout the ice surface, but it's bright enough to help me get the shots I need to get. In the Ice Dome I can shoot at 1/250th of a second, ISO 1600, f5.6 with my 300mm lens, and still get results that are good enough to be used once processed. Shooting RAW means that I can utilise the tools in Photoshop in get the best out of the exposures, and when shooting with my 18-55mm lens I can get some lovely shots!




Monday the 19th saw me shooting Phoenix related material for the third night on the trot, this time at the Phoenix Press Conference and the Meet The Players event. From shooting in great indoor light at the rink, we moved to shooting in low indoor light at the Cresta Court hotel, which necessitated a slower shutter speed than was usually comfortable. I shot a lot, and to be honest I didn't get many usable shots, but the ones I did get I'm fairly chuffed with.





Since then, the regular season has started, with a home game against the Basingstoke Bison, and it's back to business as usual.




Hand on heart, it feels like I've never been away!

Happy new season, everyone!

Ten Years Ago

This is a little departure from my usual blog entry, but I'm sure that readers will understand.

Ground Zero, April 2008.


September 11th, 2001:
When the news started to break, I was sitting in what was the Media Lab, on the first floor of Flaxman Building. I worked in that department, back in the days of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, before the Faculty of Arts Media & Design was formed, and as the news broke I was finishing a packed lunch, sitting in front of a TV monitor, watching the lunchtime news as usual.

The details at first were very sketchy, the newsreaders were saying that a plane had struck the World Trade Centre. There was a visual of a skyscraper with a hole in the side of it, but even the newsreaders didn't seem to have much of an idea of scale because the impression being given was that of a small craft, like a Cessna. But then the second plane hit, live on tv, and the scale suddenly became clear.

The sense of panic was palpable, not just on the streets of Manhattan but on the airwaves too. An international tragedy was unfurling in real time on tv screens around the world, and we were transfixed in horror, unable to look away. Lives were being lost right before our eyes, the world was changing, never to be the same again.

Throughout the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, word was spreading fast, and before long the Media Lab was filling with academics, admin staff, technicians, management. We had five or six TV screens on, each one showing a different network. At that time, the Media Lab's freeview system could take feeds from Fox News and CNN as well as the BBC, so we were able to watch the news from both sides of the Atlantic, the afternoon news here and the breakfast news from over there. VHS tapes were loaded into machines, and the news feeds recorded, recording that went on for several weeks from that point.

The news then broke of the plane hitting the Pentagon, and then of the plane coming down in Pennsylvania. We were watching as facts were reported alongside wild speculation, the realisation of it being a terror attack giving rise to a wave of paranoia and misinformation. Reports of planes being missing all over the world, of potential targets in global capitals, of fighter jets scrambled to shoot down unidentified jets. Planes being grounded all over, take-offs aborted on the runway, transport systems grinding to a halt. We watched as the Twin Towers collapsed, more lives extinguished in moments before the watching lenses of the world. We watched as the workers of Manhatten emerged from the dust, covered head to toe in grey ash, tearful, shellshocked, uncomprehending. We watched the emergency services doing their best to deal with everything at once, the chains of command stretched to breaking point, the Emergency Plans going out of the window. Everything unfurling in real time.

Home time came around, and very few people left the Media Lab. I don't remember what time we eventually closed it down for the night, but I do remember the amount of quiet in there. The room was full of people sitting, standing, watching, yet voices were largely absent. Nobody really felt like saying anything. For all of the voices that were silenced that day, the absence of ours seemed fitting.

Ten years on and we reach the anniversary. The rebuilding work is progressing slowly, the site is now a place of pilgrimage. I went over to New York in April of 2008, and I went to Ground Zero to pay my respects and have a moment of silence. I remember the sense of loss that I felt, and I remember very well the simmering anger I felt towards those standing nearby who were selling souvenirs of the tragedy. The site is surrounded by businesses, tower blocks, shops and roads, and yet there's a quietness about the place, as if those lost voices are muting out the sounds of the world around them.

Rest in peace, you will never be forgotten.

Shooting the Metros and testing the f-stops

Regular readers will know that I shoot for Manchester Phoenix Ice Hockey Club, and with the new season coming up, I'm looking forward to getting back to the rink and getting some shots done whilst freezing my zoom lens off. So when I got a call from the Phoenix team owner asking if I wouldn't mind going to cover the first Trafford Metros home game of the season to "help them out with some shots", I jumped at the chance. I figured it would be a good chance to test out a prime lens too, so I borrowed a 50mm f1.4 and set off to cover the match. The prime lens was for shooting player profile shots, something which on the day didn't happen, but it did come in handy for shooting closer-up shots from on the team bench during the warm up.




The f1.4 lens was great at shooting in the relatively low light of the rink, allowing me to shoot at ISO200 and not worry about noise on the image. However, I found that shooting at f1.4 gave me too shallow a depth of field when dealing with the close-up shots. It was great for the full body stuff a little further away from the bench, but in terms of the closer shots it was a little too good! So, lesson learned there!

I shot the action of the game using my usual 70-300mm f4.5 lens at ISO1600 (and post-produced the noise down with Noise Ninja). The game itself was a cracker, with Trafford Metros taking on Nottingham Lions and giving Manchester debuts to two of the new Phoenix British signings, Josh Ward and Ciaran Long, both of whom made an impact on the scoreboard and the opposition.




For the shooting of the action, I placed myself on my sometimes-position on the stairs in front of the block where I normally sit. It offers a great vantage point of most of the ice, the exception being the bottom right corner from where I'm standing. Which is, of course, where it all kicked off late in the third period...



The photos have been uploaded to the Official Phoenix Flickr page (rather than my own page), and my shots from the upcoming Phoenix season will also be posted there.

This weekend, I'm pleased to have been able to borrow another lens, this time a 17-55mm f2.8. I'll be hopefully using it this coming week for doing headshots of the Phoenix team (plans are still being sorted) along with one of the other Phoenix photographers, but in the meantime I've been testing the lens out on the nearest willing subject:




Actually, it's not so much a case of Lola being a willing subject, more a case of her being too lazy to wander off away from the camera!

The updated Lola and Lucy gallery can be seen on Flickr.

Thanks for reading!

The New Mr and Mrs Goodge

Towards the end of last week, Yol and I hit the dusty trail (i.e. M6) and headed up to Scotland for a few days to attend the wedding of two of our good friends, Jon Goodge and Sam Bloor. I've known Sam and Jon through ice hockey for a number of years now, and Sam and Jon were our 'travel buddies' when we all went over to Maine last year. They're a lovely couple, great fun, and well liked - the latter demonstrated by the number of people who travelled from a wide range of global destinations to attend their nuptials.

The happy couple had hired an official photographer, who did a cracking job of capturing their big day, but Sam had also asked several photographer friends (including myself) if we'd bring our cameras along and get some shots of the celebrations as well, so I was more than happy to oblige! As a specific task, Sam had asked me to shoot the groom's party getting ready, and so armed with my trusty D40 and the light from the hotel room window, I set to work. I'm more of a candid photo shooter than a posed photo shooter, which is why I was able to capture some of the more off-the-cuff moments. Moments such as the groom utilising modern technology to aid his attire: watching a YouTube video entitled "How to tie a cravat" being one of them...



But sometimes a posed photo, or even semi-posed, can work wonders, especially when it comes to weddings. There are some wedding photos that are a tradition, all photographers are supposed to shoot them, and so with this in mind, Jon was happy to pause and pose at various points to assist in my shooting:



The wedding itself was beautiful. Taking place at the Anvil Hall in Gretna, Scotland, the setting completely belied its position. The venue is on the edge of a housing estate, residential properties overlook the building and its grounds, but once you're at the venue it takes on a world of its own. A beautiful hall, lovely grounds, and a cracking setting for the marriage of two lovely people!





One of the other traditions that we held dearly to during the course of the celebrations is that of having some 'jokey tat' making an appearance at an ice hockey related wedding. When I was first married, rubber chickens were the order of the day; last year in Maine at the wedding of Jean Whitney and Joe Royle it was rubber lobsters, and this year for Sam and Jon it was rubber ducks. So throughout the wedding photographs, these little fellows put in quite a few appearances!






A full set of photos from the wedding day itself can be seen on Flickr here.

Many thanks for reading, and I'm sure you will join me in wishing the happy couple all the best for the future! Here's to Sam and Jon, cheers!