If a tree falls in the forest ...

An occupational hazard for the match day photographer is attending an eventful game, like Prescot Cables at home to Bamber Bridge, and coming away with a collection of photos that suggests nothing much happened. Five goals? Two for the opposition at the other end of the pitch; one a superb ball over the keeper's head from James McCulloch, of which the picture was too blurred to use even on the "goal is a goal" principle; a penalty from Jake Ellis where I at least got the goalkeeper going the wrong way; and a scramble for the opposition to get the points. A disputed sending off? For foul and abusive language, which is not exactly photogenic.

My favourite picture of the night was probably this one of Jake Ellis and an unnamed Bamber Bridge player (numbers on the front of shirts, you know it makes sense) ready to compete for an airborne ball.

One could see this as an existential question: in today's society with its emphasis on image, if the event has not been captured electronically, did it happen at all? However, this is a blog about taking sports photos and mildly diverting things that happen when doing so, so we can leave that one to the philosophers.

A lack of pictures on which to comment gives us space to look at some technical points. As this was the first game of the season to be played fully under floodlights (the sun disappeared behind clouds from about 7pm, necessitating the lights being turned on at kick off), it seemed a good time to look again at our old friends. I have mentioned before how different arrangements of pylons affect the distribution of light on the pitch. I have had a look at a couple of diagrams with lux values, and created rough and ready graphics based on them.

The first has 4 pylons along the side. The yellow and cream areas are those with the most light on the pitch, the orange areas are those with the least.

We can see a line of light spots along the wings, with darker spots around the goal mouth and corners, with most of the penalty area being lighter than the goal area. The outer pylons are at the corner, a little different from Prescot Cables and many other grounds that have the outer pylons nearer the middle of the pitch, which I suspect makes the dark spot in the middle of the pitch smaller, and extends that at the corners.

The second arrangement has 4 corner pylons.

Again, the goal area is one of the darker parts of the pitch, as is the centre circle, but the lighter areas are much closer to the corners.

The distribution of the light affects the best vantage point. For pylons along the side of the pitch, I usually stand below one of the middle pylons, close to one of the lightest parts of the pitch, and where I am likely to have some action taking place right in front of me, a help when using a fixed shutter speed and a lens where the maximum aperture increases as the focal length decreases.

For the corner arrangement, the decision is a trickier one. The lightest part of the pitch is in the corner, but that is further away from most of the play, demanding a longer focal length. It is an arrangement that is less common at our level of football, but when I have encountered it (e.g. Worthing, Durham City, Marine), I have found the best compromise to be found behind the goal about half way between the goal and the corner flag.

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