(AKA in at the deep end..)

This weekend saw a return trip to my old home turf of Sheffield as I covered the 2nd FINA Diving World Series at Ponds Forge sports centre. It seems the chlorine gas exposure and relentless week-long shooting of the Manchester FINA shortcourse championships wasn’t quite enough to kill me off so my Picture Editor sent me up here. His decision could well have been based on the fact that I could sleep at my folks house and save AFP the money for a hotel too, of course. *cough*

As is the way with the media, one of my two missions for the weekend (the other being shoot anything Chinese, whether man, woman, child or neutral..) was to fill my cards with images of Tom Daley , England’s current obsession in a Henman-esque way. Whenever any sportsperson shows a brief glimmer of talent, the media leaps on them, declaring that the Messiah has returned, and this time He’s in Sports Mode..

Not taking anything away from Tom or indeed his equally talented team-mate Blake Aldridge as their sychro dives produced the only 10 of the session, leading to England’s only gold medal of the day.

It’s just clear how frustrating it must be for both the other hopefuls and the sporting media that actually know about this kind of thing. News editors want the lowdown on who to support and push and once they latch on a name, they’re gripped with both hands until they either win in a blaze of glory (Steve Redgrave) or retire after a successful career that never quite reached the top so therefore must be a failure (Tim Henman). On a positive note, I have to say that from my brief few minutes with Tom, he seems like a top chap and I really do hope that he can handle the pressure and go on to become everything that he’s capable of.

Anyway, after my previous experiences of aqua-based photophun shortcourse champs in Manchester where I had the absolute pleasure of trying out the Nikon D3 system for the duration of the event, it was back to my ageing mk2n bodies and some generous noise ninja application. Shooting in these places is a real battle against noise and motion with ISO settings of between 1250 and 1600 on f2.8 while trying to freeze someone who’s flying through the air at rapid speeds.. Apparently mk3 bodies are on the way but all I’m hearing daily is complaints from current users who would rather use their old mk2n bodies. Getting new toys should be a thing to look forward to, not feel concerned about..

Fingers crossed that all of the problems with the current Canon mk3 series will be fixed by the time I head to Austria for the EURO 2008 semi-finals.. *looks dubious*