Slideshow, and rule no 2

Following our trip to Wakefield FC came news that we may have been among their last visitors. They have gained more time to negotiate funding, but still need to raise a significant amount of money to cover an unpaid sponsorship, and improvements at their previous ground that they paid for before being unable to renew their lease.With news of Bamber Bridge also cutting their playing budget, few clubs appear to be immune from financial pressures.

Whether more clubs follow the lead of Prescot Cables, and go amateur remains to be seen. I suspect there are some that should, and Prescot's experience suggests this is not as likely as sometimes thought to lead to a mass exodus of players. A club recruiting players from miles around having to cut expenditure when everyone else is increasing it may see players going elsewhere: a club with local players, making economies in today's financial climate, is likely to keep a good proportion of them.

Prescot's visitors at the weekend were Harrogate Railway Athletic. We have been used to Harrogate sides, like many from Yorkshire, with an imposing physical presence, but this time the sizes seemed more evenly matched.

It seemed just after half time when they had cancelled out an early Phil Cooney goal and then gone ahead, both courtesy of the pacy David Brown, that this would be no advantage.

Fortunately, the second Harrogate goal seemed to give Cables added focus, with a hat trick in 5 minutes from James Thomas

(here shooting for his second goal), and a goal from Liam Pearson making for a decisive victory.

I have been posting a lot so far about how to get particular photographs, lighting conditions, etc. However, I have not talked about what to do with them, and ways they may be useful to the club. My main output comes in the shape of a web album, that can be viewed as a slideshow. I use Picasa, partly out of habit because I have been using it for a long time, and partly because I like the black surround when viewing as a slideshow, I think it brings out the light and colour of the photo.

So, how big do you want your album?

There is one absolute limit -  how many pictures you have that you are happy to show. We can call this rule no 2 (rule no 1 was to get rid of anything out of focus or missing the action) - only show a photo if you are happy with it. So if you have half a dozen photos you are happy with, then show those, a small collection will still remind supporters of the game, give a flavour for those who were not there, and can be handy for the club in many ways, such as illustrating a match report on the website.

If you start to take photos regularly, you will probably start to have more than you want to show. My personal limit for the size of an album is about 60, that is enough to get all the players in, and with many more than that, people will start to switch off and not look at the rest. 60 frames takes about 3 minutes to go through in slideshow mode, so the Cables webmaster sometimes puts a show to music.

Getting an album of 60 photos is not quite as easy as turning up and taking 60 photos, at least not for me. As I have become more experienced, I have found the ratio of good to bad shots has been remarkably consistent - between one and two fifths for the bin without touching the sides, about one fifth worth cropping and making adjustments to the lighting, with about half of those making it into the final selection. So, to get an album of 60 pictures, I will have taken about 600 frames - any more than that enables me to be more choosy about the ones I select to crop.

That sounds a lot to process, although I can do the first step, getting rid of those of no use, really quickly, spending no more than a second on each photo. Picking and cropping takes longer, about three times as long as the game for the end to end process. That has stayed consistent too: as I have become more experienced, I have been able to handle a larger number of photos in the same time.

There are a few things I look for when choosing pictures: -
- a good range of action shots - players making solo runs and passes, and competing for the ball;
- getting all our players in (preferably shots they will be pleased to show to their friends, colleagues and relations);
- try not to have one or two players dominating the album (probably the most difficult to achieve);
- individual shots of players for the webmaster's profiles (and the players' Facebook pages);
- goals (ours!).

We will look at all of these in more detail in future posts, but in the meantime, the pictures from the weekend's game can be seen here.