Concentrating on the League this year, Brian

Last season, it sometimes felt like a case of "It's Tuesday, it must be Warrington Town", as we met them in the FA Cup and Doodson Sport Cup, as well as the usual meetings in the League. This season, their place has been taken by Skelmersdale United, who we faced in the first of our fixtures, in the FA Trophy at the weekend. Still to come are the New Year and Easter fixtures in the League, the Doodson Sport Cup, and a possible fixture in the Liverpool Senior Cup if they beat Burscough in the previous round.

With heavy rain having caused extensive flooding and disruption throughout the north of England earlier in the week, it was a relief to have a couple of brighter drier days at the end of the week. Normally on a sunny day, I set the camera to sports mode, and let the apertures and shutter speeds sort themselves out. Sometimes I have a senior moment, and I spent the first 5 minutes of this game shooting in shutter priority mode, with the speed from the last time I used it, 1/200s. This gave the effects - especially movement blur in the player's feet - we do not normally look for in light like this.

Luke Edwards

Having spotted my error, I settled in to more conventional shooting. I usually shoot from the same side of the ground for both halves - when I am trying to get everyone in the album, it means I am closest to the players on the right in the first half ...

Alejandro Barba San Felipe

... and those on the left in the second.

Joe Fielding

It falls apart when the second half substitutes are introduced on the side I have been concentrating on in the first half, but we cannot expect tactics to be determined by photographic requirements.

When there is an incident in the game, there is an element of luck in whether I capture it. Practice means I am pointing the camera in the right direction, with the auto focus point over one of the players involved, but we have seen how the auto focus can wander a bit, and it is luck to press the shutter at the right moment. So, I was quite pleased to capture Skelmersdale's Tony Rendell (a former Prescot player) bringing down Mario Bonetta for a penalty.

I was a little surprised Tony Rendell was sent off for denying a goal scoring opportunity, we can see the edge of the penalty area in the picture, and I think the goalkeeper was on his line and in a good position to make a save. Not that it did us any good, we were unable to overcome 10 men in the second half.

I am not sure where to stand for the resulting penalty. Staying in position behind the goal gives a good view of the penalty taker, as here with Jonathon Bathurst.

Despite a good firm shot, Skelmersdale's Sam Ashton went the right way, which gave me the feeling (correct as it turned out) that this was not going to be our afternoon. The disadvantage of this position is that I do not get a picture of the goalkeeper as the post is usually in the way. A view from the side would enable me to capture both, but would require gathering my equipment and making a brisk trot to the side (I am built for comfort rather than speed), and risks another player moving between the camera and the ball at the crucial moment and ending up with no shot at all.

In the programme, the write up from Skelmersdale referred to their having won something called the "Amateur FA Cup". They turned Amateur in the 1960s when they saw an opportunity to perform well in the FA Amateur Cup, with some justification, as they were runners up in 1967 and won the competition in 1971. Wearing my hat as a supporter of Dulwich Hamlet, with a rather longer amateur tradition, holding the status from their foundation until it was abolished in 1974, I can be a pedant, and point out that the Amateur FA Cup is something completely different.

The rest of the pictures from the game can be seen here.

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.

Amateur status

I was speaking to a friend from University, and mentioned that one of his lecturers was now a Pro-Vice-Chancellor. Not having been involved with University affairs for nearly 20 years, he asked what one of those was - I suggested it was a Vice-Chancellor who had lost his amateur status.

The big news of the weekend for supporters of Prescot Cables (bigger than losing at Bamber Bridge - we have done that before) was that the club had decided to revert to amateur status. As a Community Interest Company, the club is not able to take on debt, and with sponsorship difficult to come by in the current economic climate, it would be far from prudent to do so if this were allowed. This is of course adjusting expenditure in line with income rather than a change of status. Some clubs can afford to pay players and do, some cannot afford to and do not. Some cannot afford to and do - and eventually come a cropper.

In the past, things were different: until 1974, clubs were classified as Amateur or Professional, with the FA Amateur Cup for the amateur clubs. In some areas, clubs competed in amateur leagues, like the Isthmian League in and around London, and the Northern League in Northumberland and County Durham. In other areas, Amateur and Professional clubs competed together in leagues like the Lancashire Combination. The distinction between Amateur and Professional clubs ended mainly because, by the late 1960s, it was increasingly difficult to identify which were really amateur.

The distinction in football was not as rigid as in sports like athletics and rugby union. Speaking to, or in one case even sharing a railway compartment with, a representative from a professional rugby league club would attract a life ban from rugby union. By the 1990s, the distinction in these sports too had been removed: in rugby union for the same reasons as in football; and after a few years in athletics where the rules of "amateur" athletics entailed paying tens of thousands of pounds in prizes and appearance fees into trust funds, whilst professional athletes, whose amateur status was permanently lost, would win prizes of a couple of hundred pounds in events like Highland Games.

It remains to be seen what effect this will have on performances, as some players will undoubtedly move on, but amateur sport has a long and proud history to the highest level, and it is a step a number of other clubs may (or should) be considering as a response to the current financial situation.

Now, this is supposed to be a photo blog, and there was a game at the weekend. I like visiting Bamber Bridge, they are easy to get to, with a good tea bar and a couple of well kept real ales in the clubhouse. The weather was unusually warm and bright for the middle of October.

I was getting 1/2000s shutter speeds at ISO 400, which I usually think of as a thing of the past by the end of September.

It was the first outing for this season's away kit - the same PaxSport design as the home kit, and a photo friendly shade of blue in the sun, here worn by Leon Clowes, on loan from Wrexham.

We will see in the next few weeks how well the colour shows up in the gloomier light of November and December.

The game got off to a promising start, with a goal for Cables from Liam Pearson - here watching the ball head to the net after beating Bridge's goalkeeper.

The second half was less happy, with Cables proving unable to hold on to a lead for the third league game in succession.

After the straightforward lighting in the first half, the sun was shining along the pitch by the second half, and the rise in temperature was giving a light haze. This is easy to get rid of in Photoshop Elements using the Levels tool, in the same way we can for misty rain, leaving some striking backlit shots.

The rest of the shots from the game can be seen here.