Stopping Stan the Man

Yesterday I shot some football and rugby for the local press. The rugby was Perthshire against Peebles which ended with the Borders side winning 14-8. Perthshire had a couple of new players in their line-up. One of these was a large Samoan forward who came from Brisbane in Australia. Although I only shot 20 mins or so of the match it was fascinating to see what an impact this guy is going to make. On a couple of the occasions that Perthshire threatened the Peebles line it was left to Stan the Man to charge the Peebles defence with at least four of the borderers required to stop him. He is certainly going to add some impact to the Perthshire pack.



Why Stan the Man? Well despite asking four people what his name was no one seemed to know him as anything other than this. I eventually found out his name was Stan Fau.

Raising the bar

Up until now I have mainly concentrated on sports and now feel its time to push myself a little and have in mind a couple of features with a local interest. I don't want to say what they are at the moment but will publish images from them when they happen

This is a new direction for me so it will be a learning process which I hope will make me a better photogapher. One thing I don't get from my sports photography is being able to connect to the subject matter, so hopefully this will fill that desire in my work.

Until then here is a link to a slideshow by another photographer, Nick Adams, who has produced a great moving piece on a man down on his luck.

http://adamsvisuals.com/content/popup/Markhayes/index.html

A couple from the weekend

Kinnoull v Newtongrange Star


Kinnoull's Robbie Holden fires home their third goal against Newtongrange Star.


Kinnoull's Robbie Holden celebrates with Jamie Reilly after scoring his sides third goal against Newtongrange Star.

Saturday

Some images taken for press on Saturday. Three games in 2 hours. Much more straight forward than the previous week.

Jeanfield Swifts v Thornton

Luncarty v Ballingry

Perthshire v Murrayfield Wanderers

A little luck and putting yourself in the right place.

On Saturday I was covering Junior football for the local newspaper. The plan was to cover part of the game being played at Bankfoot and then head down to cover the second half of Kinnoull who were playing Dundee North End. Well that was the original plan. I had another job to do first and set off for Bankfoot arriving at 2.40pm thinking the game kicked off at 2.30pm. Unfortunetly no one had told me the game had kicked off early due a wedding (one of the Crossgate players getting married). The game was finished when I arrived and I left with no pictures.

Change of plan - arrived at Kinnoull, shot last 10 mins of first half and began shooting the second with the knowledge that I would now have to also cover another game in Scone (15mins away with Saturday traffic) in order to have enough pictures for different editions of the newspaper.

This is where the luck set in. Kinnoull scored within the first few minutes of the second half giving me a celebration shot for the paper.

Then it was off to Scone where I was hoping to catch the last 20mins of their game against Newburgh. Got to the game and the score was 0-0. In the last 20 mins Scone went 1-0 up only to be pegged back 1-1 courtesy of a disputed penalty and then Newburgh scored in the last couple of minutes to steal the game.

Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you have to be in the right place for the luck to happen!

Struan

The past week

Some images shot this week for the local papers. Have shot a lot of Junior football so it was nice to shoot some opera tonight!

Okay heres the football.