This one time at Swede camp..

Another day, another visit to the Swedish training camp for my daily breakfast of crusty bread with some kind of salami. Thankfully, I just discovered that the guest-house that I’m staying at serves fantastic food so my evenings are no longer spent searching the area for decent fodder.

All talk today was about a bust-up that happened yesterday between two players during the training session. Being the true professional wot I am, I’d already left the pitch-side area to shoot the Zlatan press conference so was blissfully unaware of it. Thankfully, it seems everyone else had too or I’d have been in for a bit of a slapping from the head bods.

Not understanding a word that’s said by virtually anyone during these press meetings is proving to be a slight disadvantage as, for all I know, these guys could be announcing that they’re pregnant and I’d be wandering off looking for a top -up of my peach iced tea. As I mentioned before, I’m currently basing pretty much all of my news sense on a “clicks per person” system ie as soon as someone appears, follow the pack instinct. Really not my usual thing as I like to be informed about the history of stories if possible as I think that’s the only way to go beyond the obvious picture and find something interesting.

Eyebrows were raised by the other photographers when I started shooting shots like the one below. A commonly used technique in London, for some reason out here people were asking me how I was doing it including a camera crew that interviewed me on tv and filmed my stunningly interesting technique.. *cough* For those few that can’t work it out, it’s just a 16mm lens on a ten second timer on the end of a monopod, held in the air over the scrum of journos. Some would simply use a chair but where’s the style in that, eh? Having said that, the crews out here are so hungry for material to fill the airtime, I’d probably have ended up doing an interview about my chair technique..

So halfway through my tour of duty with two of my four matches shot, I can now say, if all goes according to plan, that this time next week I’ll be heading home to my lovely lady and work that interest me. Never again will I feel the need to scoff at any job in London (or at least for a week or so..)

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 4:17 pm. It is filed under The working day and tagged with Andreas Isaksson, EURO2008, euros, football, henrik larsson, journalism, leon neal, Mikael Dorsin, news, olof mellberg, photographer, photographic, press, rami shaaban, soccer, sport, sweden, swedish, villa selva. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.