A view of Westmorland

I have often heard that the town of Kendal has a picturesque setting. I had never seen it, my previous visits having been in the rain or at night. The forecast for our game at Kendal Town was for bright weather, so I took an early train and went to Windermere. Being unable to see a hill without wondering what is at the top, I walked up to Orrest Head, where the advertised views were most definitely available.

Returning to Kendal, the day was still bright and sunny, but the west of the ground has a stand and a number of trees, so there were plenty of shadows. I usually just need to use the automatic settings on Nikon ViewNX 2 to convert my files from raw to jpeg for processing. I sometimes wonder whether it would be easier to shoot in jpeg and let the camera do the work, but ViewNX 2 makes use of the computer's processing power and not having to deliver a result in a second or so. In some high contrast situations, I need to work on raw files manually, and this time I used the facility for 15 - 20 frames.

Phil Bannister

In some locations, the players cast strong shadows on themselves.

Ben Cartwright

Now that Brian Richardson had seen the squad for training we were expecting a few changes. The only new(ish) face was goalkeeper Phil Priestly, who played in the Liverpool Senior Cup semi final in July, but has been with Skelmersdale United in the meantime.

Phil Priestly

James McCulloch was in midfield, having played in defence so far this season. He has played there before, but has been accustomed to midfield in recent years, and looked particularly effective on this occasion.

James McCulloch

Dominic Marie was on the bench: having joined in pre season, he was making his first competitive appearance.

Dominic Marie

The hosts made the most of the terrain, as you expect the home side to do - I still remember with some bewilderment the Cables manager a few years ago who said our pitch made it difficult to play our preferred game. They got the ball downhill as quickly as possible, endangering our goal, and, even when we cleared, making us tire ourselves chasing it back uphill. It was effective, giving them two goals.

Garry Williams emerged at half time to brief the substitutes that we would attempt the same in the second half - he also briefed me, as he thought it might be good for a few photos. He was right on that, assisted by my taking up position in the bottom corner of the ground, and by the floodlights being switched on during half time.

Jacob Jones

It took longer to work in the footballing sense, with the hosts scoring another before we were able to break our own drought, with Lloyd Dean scoring on 67 minutes.

Lloyd Dean

Despite keeping up the pressure, we were unable to add to this.

It is sometimes said that in this country we do not take cold seriously. I remember a few years ago visiting Helsinki over the second weekend in September: when I arrived on Thursday there were plenty of short sleeves, by Monday everyone was in seriously warm looking coats. Following a mild October, I did not realise how quickly the temperature had dropped, so I was slow to adopt extra layers and gloves. I declined the offer of another lift from the Johnstones, having in mind a pint or two in the Ring O'Bells with their local ales and open fire. I needed it by the time I got there, I had lost feeling to the extent I needed to pick my first pint up from the bar with both hands.

The rest of the pictures can be seen on the club website here, and on Google Photos here.

Final score: Kendal Town 3 Prescot Cables 1 (Dean)

Welsh and techie stuff

To alleviate any alarm, I am not taking the opportunity of Prescot Cables' game against Colwyn Bay to create a technical blog in Welsh. My knowledge of the language is limited to stock phrases like "Dim ysmygu", of no use to me as I do not smoke, "Dim parcio", likewise as I do not drive, and North Wales Police's Bobbies on buses scheme, deploying officers to combat crime and anti social behavour on public transport, "Bobbis ar bysys". I am sure that should be "Bobbiau ar bysiau", but we will let that pass. With a relatively uneventful game, I thought I would follow up my comments about file sizes with a couple of examples of the position in the evening.

This was an important game to see how the team recovered from the heavy defeat at the weekend. For a note of pessimism, we were joined by Dr Jon, attending his first game of the season, discussing whether he had ever seen us win a game. Well, they say it is the hope that kills you ...

We looked last time at pictures of play in front of the advertising. I do not get much from this angle at evening games, as I go to the Gasworks Side, so I am standing behind it. However, before I went round, I captured this shot. Saturday's pristine white has been replaced by a darker shade, and there is plenty of grain.

Joe Herbert

We can see the same in this shot of our goal. The inside of the stand looks black at lower resolutions, but at a bigger size we can quickly see the grain.

Tom Brocklehurst

All this makes for a bigger file, and therefore those extra seconds waiting for it to load for processing, adding up over 100 or so images, and working all the way through to the time to upload. The album, with 60 or so pictures, from this game was about 30MB larger than that from Saturday. It is one reason why the pictures from a Tuesday evening game usually only appear on Friday.

James Edgar

For about the first 15 minutes of the game, the team still looked shocked from Saturday, but after that started to put in a much better performance. Unfortunately it was in that 15 minutes that we conceded the only goal of the game, against opponents who were difficult to break down, and a few of whom sounded as though may not have had as far to come as you might expect.

Rob Doran

The rest of the pictures from the game can be seen on the club website here, and on Google Photos here.

Final score: Prescot Cables 0 Colwyn Bay 1.

Changing a lightbulb

Prescot Cables continued their pre season programme with a visit from 1874 Northwich, who we met in last season's F.A.Cup. This was another evening game, with cooler and cloudier, but drier, weather than against Charnock Richard the previous week. This meant we would be unlikely to complete the game without the floodlights. The positive side was that the mosquitoes that had liberally populated the Gasworks Side last week had gone home for an early night.

The light was a bit gloomy, which often does not work well with the automated creation of jpeg files, saving them on the camera, or using the batch conversion in ViewNx. However, I was able to fix everything in editing without needing to adjust the lighting in raw.

Joe Nicholson

We went ahead with a goal from Andy Scarisbrick, included here on the "goal is a goal" principle. We will not see him wearing that number very much, but for these games players seem to be putting on whatever number is at the top of the laundry basket, which makes sense when most are substituted at some point.

Snapping from the side gives the chance to catch those pictures of a throw in that give exposure to the shirt back sponsor.

At half time, it was time to capture the shots Paul, the programme editor, wanted to use for this season's cover. There was the obligatory view of the stand (not many clubs have anything like it) ...

... and a view of the gates and smart new sign promoting the ground sponsor, Volair, Knowsley Council's organisation for leisure services, who are providing training facilities at the new Prescot Soccer Centre.

The floodlights came on for the second half, which the software seemed to like - this was my first use of ViewNX with images from under our own lights.

Sam Staunton-Turner

We continue to see players progressing from the Youth team, with last year's goalkeeper and Manager's Player of the Year James Burke taking his turn in goal - so much for my being unsure of his age when he made his début for the First team away to Northwich Victoria.

James Burke

The visitors pulled a goal back, with a group of their supporters singing that they had not come to mess around - an attitude confirmed by both sides with a competitive second half.

As I walked round to the clubhouse towards the end of the game...

Make  people think you are a hopper by taking a picture of a corner flag

... I spotted an outstanding job had been completed. Soon after the current floodlights were installed, the bulb went in one of the heads between the stand and the Safari Park End, which has rendered that corner unavailable for photography. It has now been replaced, no small undertaking. I cannot remember if the column unscrews at the bottom, but either way the equipment and skilled personnel required costs more than the bulb. Play seems to have been unaffected: I mentioned it to Jonah O'Reilly, who had not noticed.

James McCulloch, illuminated by the repaired floodlights

The rest of the pictures from the game can be seen on the club website here, and on Google Photos here.

Final score: Prescot Cables 1 (Scarisbrick) 1874 Northwich 1.

It never rains in Southern California

At Sedgley Park on the other hand...

I have not seen much of Lancashire's campaign in the rugby union County Championship for the Bill Beaumont Cup this year, sticking with football for the end of the North West Counties League season. However, I was free for the last game, against Cheshire, at the familiar venue of Sedgley Tigers (or Park, as those of us of a traditional bent pronounce it). The weather in Manchester was as expected, with the air close enough to give me an urgent desire to open a window, until I remembered I was already outdoors.

I am always surprised by the number of spectators at these games wearing wellingtons. Facilities vary between grounds, and the authorities are not as keen as in football to ensure you stay on the hard standing, but even so, it seems like overkill. Wet weather protection was, however, needed quickly after the kick off, as a large cloud dumped its load on us.

You do not expect to see steam coming off the scrum at this time of year.

Once the rain had passed, the light was fairly even, with the sun occasionally poking through light cloud. There were more dark clouds in the distance, which I hoped would not bring more rain, as I had a line of washing out to dry.

I experimented a bit with the resulting images. A disadvantage of shooting in raw is the extra processing time, so I was looking to speed this up. I tried the ViewNX 2 software that came with the camera. If I want to make changes to the raw file, it does not have any speed advantages over Photoshop Elements, and indeed seems considerably slower. However, if the only changes could as easily be made to the jpg, it offers a batch conversion. As this uses a lot of cpu resource and little memory or disk, whereas editing uses the opposite, I can start editing as soon as a couple of jpgs have emerged from the process.

The results seemed quite crisp.

It was not always as clear what was going on.

It even looked at one point as though the referee was thinking of making a move with the ball.

Lancashire have been successful in these encounters for the last few years, with the county almost being an extension of the successful Fylde sides, and reaching seven successive Finals. With a number of players appearing to have retired, and a change of management at Fylde, Lancashire's dominance looks to be slipping, with the visitors securing a clear win to claim the place in the Final. Things were worse the other side of the Pennines, with Yorkshire finishing bottom of the group.

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

Final score: Lancashire 11 Cheshire 27.

Shooting raw part 2 - night

You know you have arrived when one of your pictures is on a pump clip! The latest product badged for us by the Melwood Beer Company featured two of our longer standing supporters.

In my previous post, I looked at saving pictures in raw format and processing lighting and exposure on the computer. Whilst I will use this for non sports pictures, I was not yet sure whether the benefit was worth the extra work for sports during the day. However, being used to stretching the best the camera has to offer in low light, I was keen to see the effect at night. With a lack of success in the FA competitions, we have not had many midweek games, so I was fortunate to have a quick opportunity to test with our game at home to Kendal Town.

As in the weekend's game, we started well with an early goal from Lloyd Dean as I was making my way round to the gasworks side.

Lloyd Dean

When I got the pictures home, the first thing I looked at was the white balance. In the shutter priority mode on the camera, I use the auto setting, which under floodlights imparts a slight yellow cast. There is a fluorescent setting, but whilst floodlights are gas discharge lamps, and like a domestic fluorescent light contain mercury, they also contain sodium, which explains the yellow cast. As with the daylight photos, it took a few attempts to get the setting right, but the advantage of a floodlit game is that the lighting is constant throughout.

Danny Flood

The real revelation came with the exposure. Because I use a consumer lens with a small maximum aperture, I have to slightly under expose the image to retain an acceptable shutter speed - 1/200s is the slowest we can get away with, with some movement blur in the players' hands and feet and in the ball.

The lighten shadows function in Photoshop Elements has a tendency to increase noise, particularly light grain on a dark background. Using the exposure function on the raw image allows lightening with much less increase in noise - and for that which remains, the noise reduction function is much more powerful than that on the camera (which should not be a surprise, the computer has more processing power).

Marcus Burgess

Amidst this technical detail, there was a game going on. Kendal equalised after about 20 minutes with a shot that hit the bar and bounced downwards. Observers nearer than me were confident it went in, but Jordan Connerton avoided a Russian linesman moment by putting the rebound in the net.

Rob Doran restored our lead a few minutes later.

Jordan Connerton restored parity for the visitors 20 minutes into the second half, and for the remaining time the spectators were treated to a game with a realistic chance of going either way up to the end, with a draw being a fair result.

We saw the first appearance this season by Antony Shinks, returning a break from playing and some time in the United States.

Antony Shinks

The game was also the 100th appearance by Phil Bannister, who made a welcome return to the club in pre season.

Phil Bannister

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

Final score: Prescot Cables 2 (Dean, Doran) Kendal Town 2.

Shooting raw

I do not often make significant changes to the way I work at a game: I have had the same kit for some time, and know most of the features I need. However, I have always saved my pictures on the camera as jpeg files, and have been generally satisfied with the results. Think of a jpeg file as like a print, but one you can edit. The camera adjusts things like white (or colour) balance, brightness and noise, then compresses the file. The alternative is to save as a raw file, a bit like a film negative. You get all the information from the sensor, which gives much more control over exposure and lighting, and changes are saved to a separate file, so you always keep the original without having to make multiple backups.

Last week, I was feeling curious, and wondered how much extra work was involved processing from raw, and realised the answer is - not much. Photoshop Elements can open files from most cameras, so it is just a couple of extra steps. I then went to take some pictures of general subjects for test files, and quickly decided the extra control for non sports work is well worth it.

For sports the equation is more balanced: as I process about 100 - 120 images from a game, even a minute or so per image can add an hour or two to the job. I decided it was worth a try at Prescot Cables' game at home to Ossett Albion.

My SD card was a bit old and slow, and I was only going to get a new one if the test was successful. When shooting frames in raw in quick succession, a fast card avoids having to stop for the buffer to empty. I was doing just that, and missed the first goal, from Lloyd Dean.

Lloyd Dean

Once I got the images on the computer, adjusting the white balance required some practice to avoid making the players look puce, or, failing that, green. After a short while, I started to get usable images, and as there was even cloud cover throughout the game, once I had got it right, I could stick to the same settings.

James McCulloch

I continued my experiment from the previous week, and spent some time behind the goal, before going to the gasworks side, ending up at the half way line.

George Mannion

In a couple of pictures, the players seemed particularly sharp - you can judge for yourselves whether this survives the conversion on the computer and upload to Google+.

Joe Evans

We went a second goal ahead just before half time through the good offices of Rob Doran.

In the second half I went to the half way line again, which was probably a good position, as the half was quite evenly matched until the balance fell decisively in our favour 10 minutes from the end with a second goal from Rob Doran. There were some good saves from Marcus Burgess, never easy to capture, even standing closer to our goal than I am accustomed.

Marcus Burgess

With only moments to go, Rob Doran completed his hat trick, and I got a decent sequence. It is all very well knowing the technology, but you still have to capture the action.

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

Final score Prescot Cables 4 (Dean, Doran 3) Ossett Albion 0