Bosh! Another remote shot published.
I spent Saturday as Reading FC’s club photographer deputising for their excellent regular photographer Jason, as Reading travelled away to play at Charlton. Firstly, I’ve got to say thanks to the Charlton staff who were superb, polite and friendly throughout – what nice folks. I hadn’t been to The Valley before, so it was refreshing to be welcomed and shown around. I was also on commission for the Sunday Mirror, both jobs thanks to the ever-growing Focus Images.
As usual I went over on the motorbike and got there at about midday for a 3pm kick off. This is more like a Chelsea schedule than my normal timetable for a Championship match, but I figured with it being a new ground to me, in a quite tricky part of London to get to, it was worth the early start. I also had some pre-match warm up pictures to shoot as part of the brief meaning early was good.
There’s a bit of a different mindset needed when shooting for the club rather than just for the newspapers. Pictures that would never make a paper are very valuable to the club so its much more than “just” the goals and celebrations. On Saturday Wayne Bridge was back in the squad after many months out following surgery on a knee injury in November, so he was a key player to get pictures of before the game and during if he did play. I was also looking for fan pictures, general views of the ground & pitch condition, player warm ups, subs coming on and so on.
The club were also keen to get pictures as near to live as possible as they are hot on their social media updates, so I had sent in a selection of pre-match pictures ahead of kick off which made their way onto the various Reading social media feeds, and also provided live pictures during the game of some first half action and then the winning goal and cele in the second half. It also meant I shot a lot more than I would otherwise, with 895 images on the memory cards and 131 sent up to Reading, and a subset of 40 to the Sunday Mirror and the other papers. You can see some of them on the Reading site, and on Focus Images here.
I had my remote set up (the trusty footswitch-triggered Olympus OMD-EM5) which turned in some cracking pictures of the only goal of the game, one of which the Sunday Mirror used. It’s great when a remote shot turns out as generally they are all pretty rubbish! Happily this time the ball rebounded inside the net and appeared smack in the middle of the frame, rescuing what would otherwise be a very distant overly wide picture.
As the final whistle neared I figured that the Reading players would come over to thank their fans, so I swapped the 400 for my 24 1.4 and got ready in case they came in close. Lo and behold the much bloodied Kaspars Gorkss came over and handed his shirt to a delighted fan, and then goal scorer Danny Williams did the same. The wide 24mm was just right to get right in there, with some excellent fan reactions as well.
I was fairly stressed beforehand, with both the club and Sunday Mirror to satisfy, so having the goal and cele in the bag, some nice action plus a load of fantography, it was a pretty good day overall, and helped further by a couple of shots used in the Daily Mail online.
Yes, I’ve learnt how to code in Java!
Saturday was also the first live test of my own little locked file copying utility. Regular readers will remember my posts on John Kirkpatrick’s AutoCopy utility which automatically copies locked or protected files from an inserted memory card. With the World Cup looming and the likelihood that I’ll be using Focus Images’ new remote live editing suite, I wanted to ensure I have complete control over the way files are grabbed from the memory card. There’s nothing wrong with John’s version, but if I encounter problems in the middle of the Amazon I want to know that I can fix them myself. This is also an obvious and undisguised attempt to out-geek fellow Focus shooter Ian Wadkins who has recently risen to Chief Geek which I’m not at all sore about.
And so I downloaded a copy of the Java “Integrated Development Environment” NetBeans which is thankfully free, and got on with learning to code in Java. It’s rather weird with all the packages and stuff, but after doing the “Hello World” thing, a few days of fannying about resulted working program which could identify the read-only bit on a file and then copy it. There then followed some frenzied “parameterisation” to get rid of the hard coded directory paths and suchlike, and learning all about ArrayList functionality to store copied filenames and prevent duplicate copying. I also added a beeping noise every time a file is copied. With Google it’s so much easier to get at the Java language syntax than back in my day, when you had big 2-inch thick reference manuals to leaf through. Now you can get code snippets, worked examples, and excellent support instantly for free. Cool.
Amazingly, it all worked and locked files flew off the memory card and onto my laptop’s hard drive, whilst beeping furiously. My next step is to confirm it will work properly when copying to a network drive that the Focus remote editing team can work their magic on.
Later this week sees me photographing Aussie Rules again as the best young Australian players come over to the UK on their tour of Europe. The Australian Institute of Sport AFL Academy team will be playing the AFL Europe team at 2pm on April 12th at Harrow School if you’d like to go. Details here.