14 August 2012

Sledge Hockey at the Rink, Garden Make-Over Time, and the Knight's Chambers

This past Sunday, I found myself back at the Atrincham Ice Dome shooting for the Manchester Phoenix. This time it was to document the home debut of the Manchester Phoenix Sledge Hockey team, taking part in a three team tournament against the Kingston Kestrels and a team made up of representatives from Peterborough Phantoms and the Battle Back Bison, a team of injured servicemen.

I've never photographed Sledge Hockey before, in fact I've never seen it in the flesh before, so shooting it was going to be a new challenge - would it be like shooting ice hockey, or would it involve different tactics to get the shots I wanted?...





Other than the action taking place lower to the ice than regular hockey, shooting it turned out to pretty much abide by the same principles as a Phoenix EPL team:  follow the action, shoot the players, and try to get the shots that tell the story.   One of the bonuses of shooting Sledge is that the players don't utilise the team benches, so there's plenty of room to get up close to the action and to the breaks in play:







The action on the ice was surprisingly quick, and surprisingly brutal at times, with some impressive skills and even more impressive collisions on display.  Shooting it was a joy, it was a whole new experience for me, and the results are something I'm pretty chuffed with!






The full set of photos from the tournament can be seen on Flickr here: Manchester Phoenix Sledge Hockey tournament.

Things have been busy on the domestic front too, with our back garden being landscaped and given a new lease of life!  Anyone who's ever been to our house will know that the back garden has been something of a ski-slope, and that previous attempts to turn it into something resembling an actual garden have not been as successful as we'd have liked.  Yol contacted a lovely small company featuring some of the hardest working people I've ever met, and in the space of one week they overhauled the place so much that you wouldn't recognise it!


As well as having a deck and a patio, which I've wanted for some time now, we've also got a couple of lovely features that really mark the garden as being ours, courtesy of the design genius of Yol!:





Our climbing plants will have something truly stylish to reach for the sky on!


Today I took a trip into Manchester to shoot some portraits for Central Chambers, a legal practice that is the professional base of Ben Knight, the gentleman behind the Phoenix Podcast.  Ben's company needed some new portraits for their website, and I was happy to oblige!  Whilst there, Ben asked if I could shoot a couple of shots for his other Podcast, NorthPod Law, which is a legal podcast hosted by Ben himself along with Kirstin Beswick.  Ben and Kirstin set the office up as if recording a podcast, I set up the lights, and away we went!



I will post links to the Central Chambers and Northpod Law sites once the pictures have gone live.

Cheers all!

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