Pointless vanity project of the former Tabascokid

As many of you know, I LOVE football.  Everything about it excites me, be it adding new parts to your kit, learning new grooves or finally nailing a fill you’ve been working on for a while…  Erm.. Hang on.  That’s drumming.  Oh, FOOTBALL.  That’s the one I don’t like at all.

Pushing this from my mind, I had the pleasure of heading up to Sam Platt’s bar in Manchester to cover football fans as they watched a live broadcast of the Champion’s League final between Manchester United and Barcelona in Rome.

When you’re shooting this kind of thing, you have to constantly read the crowd’s “vibe” and react accordingly to how the game is going. When the local team is winning, then you can happily shoot away as the fans celebrate but if it turns, suddenly covert photography is the name of the game.  With Manchester 1-0 down by the half-time and goal #2 coming soon into the second half, the mood soon became more delicate as a few guys started to become slightly more “camera-shy” with stern words said to any photographer heading their way.

With the match over and Manchester United finishing in silver position, it was back to the hotel before heading to Manchester airport to catch the team as they returned home. It’s not often that I get to say this but I have to shout praises for the media team at terminal 2.  Not only did they send out a mail with a plan of the arrival area and how it was expected to happen, upon arrival they would do anything they could to make everyone happy.  A really great team to work with.

Talking of great things to work with, the same cannot be said for my Nikon 70-200 f2.8G lens.  I’ve heard a reasonable number of people moaning about it with some going as far as selling the new one and searching shops to buy one of the previous models but I’d always been happy enough.  Admittedly, the focus is a little slow on the uptake when comparing it to the 400mm f2.8 but once it’s locked on, it’s always done me proud.  Today was all different as the lens searched and failed to lock on constantly as the team walked towards me in arrivals.  Editing the shots afterwards, I had to delete at least half the shots from the card as they were so far out of focus.  Very poor indeed.  I’m certainly open to the suggestion that I may be missing some settings that can be tweaked to improve performance but on yesterday’s performance, I’m beginning to side with the grumblers.  If anyone does have any hints, please do get in touch!

In a thoroughly unusual turn of events, yesterday I turned up to shoot Jean Michel Jarre’s first world tour when it came to Wembley Arena only to be given a AAA laminate and told that I could stay as long as I wanted.  Huzzah!  Makes a change from the usual three song limit.

Looking like a combination of a keyboard museum and an airport control tower, the stage was a monument to digital music without an acoustic instrument in site (until he broke out an accordian for an added touch of Gallic culture..)

Having never really shot that many lasers before, this was a bit of a trial by fire as I’ve never really considered the relationship between the frequency of the laser beams and the shutter speed of the camera. When JMJ came to the front of the stage for his famous “laser harp” section, I found that anything faster than 45th of a second would result in some of the beams missing but anything slower than 250th on the 400mm lens would show movement.  The real pain is that the lighting rig is so good that the stage is flooded with more light than you could ever need but you end up shooting at painfully slow speeds to capture the beams.  Bahh.  Anyway, enough technical business..

Having only ever done a handful of one-off dates in previous years, the “In Doors” tour is surprisingly his first world tour and is now heading off to Northern England, Holland, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland before heading to the US in 2010.

Thanks go to LD Communications for arranging the extended access at the concert. Cheers peeps!

Today saw our second and final scan before the big day in September. All looks well and despite being a decidedly lazy little buggar, the little tinker appears to be all fine and dandy! Huzzah!

With another hurdle passed, we then decided to do our first “babystuff” browsing (rather than shopping due to severe skintness). Prams are currently the point of discussion with various types being the unit of choice until we get our hands on them and find problems. If anyone has a nice bugaboo to sell me for a nice cheap price, you know where I am. I could even throw in a print or two!

Working within the shining golden towers that is “the media”, it’s quite easy to forget how much influence (or rather ironically “influenza” in Italian) it has over how people feel on a day to day basis.  I see my self as quite toughened to the scaremongering of certain news outlets and can usually laugh it all off but last week’s coverage of our impending H1N1 doom left me feeling edgy.

As usual, there were a number of media sources that kept their heads and reported fact alone with the BBC actually going as far as saying that deaths on a serious scale were highly unlikely and we shouldn’t be too worried.  Two clicks on my remote would take me to Sky where the bluescreen behind the presenter was filled with a giant evil virus, pulsating and threatening to mug you if you change channel.  I happened to catch the moment when California declared a state of emergency so being able to switch between the two stations to see in real-time how they handled it was fascinating.  While Sky broke out the “Breaking News!” ticker and the newsreader declared that California was a virtual disaster zone as the virus hurtled towards golbal pandemic, the BBC pointed out that it was simply a formality to ensure that if medical supplies were needed, the fact that they had officially declared a State emergency would mean the equipment wouldn’t have to go through all the usual bureaucracy.

As was expected, the newspapers were full of images of Mexicans wearing surgical masks in the street and soon photographers were drafted to Heathrow to wait for the walking wounded to stagger from the arrivals corridor, clutching at their throats and coughing up infected blood.  Those dispatched found a rather unhelpful flow of people who weren’t quite as frantic as the picture desks were hoping for.

The panic-mongering media really should be very wary of how they handle these things as we were all told that Avian flu, SARS and BSE would be the death of us all and in the end it hasn’t been.  How many more times can they report medical issues in this style before they it has no effect?  I’m sure some day it will be a serious issue and when it is, who’ll believe the boy who cried wolf?

NB: Having published this blog, I am acutely aware that I have now automatically triggered the countdown until my early death due to a unique superstrain of all three recent scares.  You may think the odds of all three becoming one is as likely as pigs flying but what do you expect from avian swine, eh?