The cutting room floor

At Prescot Cables' home game against Radcliffe Borough at the weekend, one of our supporters, Steve Nolan, brought along some old programmes for Webmaster Geoff to scan in for the match programmes section on the website. An advertisement caught my eye in one for a local "Turf Accountant" - it is years since I saw a bookmaker advertising as that.

Those were the days of photography on film. I tried taking photos on film at a game once, although I quickly realised this was likely to be expensive - each frame cost about 35p in film and processing - and not particularly productive. There was the question of where to show them, short of wandering round with envelopes full of prints, like those dreaded evenings when you went to your neighbours' to view their holiday snaps.

I am a bit cautious when using a zoom lens about getting the action in shot, so I tend to use a shorter focal length than may be necessary. With modern sensors, it is also easy to take pictures from one end of the pitch to the other with a 200 - 300mm lens. In both cases, there will be a lot of space in the frame around the action: the same will be true with many shots taken on a compact camera.

In some cases, the background will be an interesting part of the photo, and these will come up in later posts, but in most cases it is of no particular interest, and takes the eye away from the action. Take this fairly standard shot of Cables' Fraser Ablett.

The background does not add much, so let us get rid of it. I do this in Photoshop Elements, but there are plenty of free utilities, like the Picasa uploader, that offer a crop function as well.

Sometimes, cropping makes the image. Take this example of Cables' Tony Sayer going for a header.

The background here is quite cluttered, and the header is almost lost in the rest of the picture. However, if we take out most of the background, we get a much better image.

This is a topic that will come up again in future posts, but in the meantime, the pictures from the weekend's game can be found here.