'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!

Looking to the Heavens, Spot The Moggy, Holy Spiders and Exploring Around the Corner

One evening last week, several people on Facebook were posting statuses about how beautiful the moon looked, and since I had a borrowed Nikon D90 in my possession I decided to go out and shoot it. (Regular readers will know about my almost lycanthropic fixation with our natural satellite!) But alas, it wasn't visible from my garden (or from the front of the house) so instead I decided to try a little astral photography. The clear skies above gave a lovely view of the heavens, but the light pollution was understandably high for an inner-city location. Still, I gave it a shot!




I'm hoping for another clear night soon, when I can go out of the city and see what I can get. I know that there are better images of the stars just waiting to be taken!

These images can be seen on Flickr in the Sunsets & Skies set.

Saturday was a day of gardening, which for us necessitates taking our lives into our hands and working on a slope (our back yard is a steep slope upwards). It also necessitates pulling my hockey kit out of the shed to give us access to the gardening tools, so I take the opportunity to unzip the kit bag and 'airate the kit' a little. This, naturally, results in another round of 'Spot The Moggy':


Another chance encounter on Saturday in the garden was with a common garden spider, sitting in the middle of his (or her) web, lunching on a ladybird:


I'd never really noticed the cross pattern on the backs of garden spiders, so this one was too good an opportunity not to shoot. At least, that's what I told Yol when I left her sorting out the gardening whilst I faffed about with macro lens adaptors!

Sunday, traditionally a day of rest (except in hockey season), but for Yol and I this week it was a chance to go and explore a couple of locations that we'd had our eye on for a while but not gotten around to visiting. The first of which was Park Hall Country Park, about a mile away from our house - we'd driven past it dozens of times but never ventured in. The first thing to say about it is, it's bigger than you think!




The range of wildlife and plantlife there is impressive, and the scenery is something to behold. Plenty of options and opportunities for the aspiring lensman. We spent a good couple of hours wandering around, following pathways and shooting the scenery, the woodlands, the plants, the birds, pretty much anything that looked interesting!





After walking around the park for more than two hours, we stumbled upon the Visitors Centre and discovered that they sell maps of the Park, along with wildlife guides. In honesty we could probably have benefitted from those earlier, but it has inspired us to return again and explore the areas that we were yet to see.

Our next destination of choice was Caverswall Castle, so off we set to where we believed it to be. Needless to say, it's not there. It's not where the Satnav tells you it is, it's not where their own map tells you it is. So it remained undiscovered (until we went home, looked on Google Maps and spotted it, where it's always been, on a road that we travel down on a regular basis...)

Whilst out looking for the Castle, we came across Foxfield Railway Station, a tourist attraction near Blythe Bridge that is based around steam locomotives. So we stopped off for a look around, and naturally a few photo opportunities presented themselves:





It turns out that we'd stumbled upon the place during one of their 'event days' when the trains were up and running, so our piece of bad fortune at not finding the castle turned into a piece of good fortune in discovering the station!

The full set of photos from our day of exploring can be seen in the Flickr set here.

Padded Gloves, Shin Pads, and Shooting The Moon

Over the past few weeks I've been working on a series of student induction films for the Uni to use, working closely with my colleague Chris Leese. Chris is also working on a promotional short for the gym where he trains as a kickboxer, and we had the idea of shooting some material in our Shoot Studio at the Uni. So that's what we did! We set up some harsh, moody lighting, and got some shots of Chris putting his fighting pads on and doing some shadow boxing, and whilst we were filming it struck me that this was a great opportunity for an impromptu photo shoot. Chris sportingly agreed to it, and we squeezed in a quick 15 minute shoot:



The lighting was mostly from a single overhead 300W spotlight, pointing straight downwards, with a little fill light coming from two dimmed and diffused 300Ws off to the sides. I felt that the result was very pleasing, and Chris was quite chuffed with the outcome as well. We ran through some poses, and then Chris shadow-boxed some more whilst I shot away:




Sometimes, when life presents you with a photo opportunity, you'd be mad not to take it!

The full set of photos from this shoot can be seen here: "Chris Leese: Kickboxer" set on Flickr.

Regular readers will know that I have a bit of a fixation with shooting the moon. The face of the moon that we can see from Earth barely changes, so most shots of the moon are pretty similar, but there's still something special about our planet's satellite. A clear sky and a view through the trees behind my house gave me this view during last week:



It was the first time that I'd gone for a more stylised shot of the moon, and I was quite pleased with the result. It's not perfect but it's not too far off what I'd intended. I couldn't resist taking a regular moonshot though, it had to be done!



This past Saturday, I was in Grimsby for a family celebration (parents' 45th wedding anniversary, sister's 4th wedding anniversary, mine and Yol's engagement, and my birthday too!) and after dinner I took the chance to go out into the garden and shoot the full moon. This time the clouds were giving the light a lovely diffused aura effect, and so I snapped away at a variety of exposures to see what I could get:



At one point the moon was partially covered by a sash of cloud:



But the clouds parted long enough for me to get a birthday night full moon shot, and so I took the chance:



Just had to be done!

The updated gallery of moonshots can be seen here: "Moonshots" set on Flickr.

Thanks for reading!

Shirt Launch, All Hallows and a surprise encounter with a Lightning

Last Sunday was the annual Manchester Phoenix shirt launch, and I was there as a second snapper (alongside Nick Ogden) to get some pictures of the event. Nick's main job was to get the photos of the new team shirts for the team website, so my role was to get a general feel for the event, and go for a more candid feel. This to me is the best approach to take - I've never been much of a fan of posed photos (don't get me wrong, there's a time and a place for them) but I'm much more in favour of spontaneous shots, capturing moments, and taking photos of people being themselves rather than grinning for the camera.




After the end of the last hockey season, there was a need for an overhaul of how the Phoenix photography was made available for the press, and how the pictures were distributed. I put together a proposal for some changes to the infrastructure, and the first step in its implementation was the establishment of an official Phoenix Flickr page, which is where the shots from the shirt launch event can now be seen.

Yesterday, Yol and myself took up an invitation to visit Michael and Sarita Ainsworth for a barbecue and a look around All Hallows Church, in Mitton, Lancashire. Those of you who've followed my blatherings for a while will know that for some reason I've developed a bit of an interest in shooting churches, cathedrals and places of worship, despite registering largely on the atheist scale. Michael and Sarita were kind enough to give us access to all areas of the church, and this proved to be a great opportunity for a "spot of shutterbuggery", to quote Eric Idle! The church itself is lovingly looked after, and very interesting on the eye.





Michael was also kind enough to give us access to the top of the church tower, and to see the stunning views that the elevation afforded us. To the east of the church is Pendle Hill, the home of the Pendle Witches in the 17th century, and all around were landscape views to take away the breath and to give the soul a moment's pause!




Thank you to Sarita and Michael for their generous hospitality! The album of photos from the visit can be seen on Flickr here.

The trip to Mitton also provided me with a surprise encounter that caused me to turn around the car, park up and get the camera out! Regular readers will know that as well as churches, I also like to photograph aircraft, and being a Grimsby boy born in the flightpath of RAF Binbrook I've a soft spot for the Lightning. So it was with pleasure that our route to Mitton took us past the BAE Systems site in Balderstone where there is a Lightning on display in the grounds.



The plane was behind a security fence, so I had to get as close as possible to the barrier and shoot through the chainlinks! Quite tricky, but totally worth it! The shots of the Lightning can be seen on Flickr here.

Thank you for reading!