Sable salamanders

The trip to Spennymoor Town is our longest of this season, involving a train to Durham and a bus. TransPennine have even less unreserved seats than in the past, with the high numbers in coach B succumbing to the march of the little white tickets. A lot are reserved for less than the whole journey, but with no system of putting them together to make more available for longer journeys bought on the day.

The bus to Spennymoor is an Arriva Sapphire service, with handy things like charging points and free WiFi. The former supplied enough oomph for the charge on my phone not to go down, but not enough for it to go up. For the latter, I logged on to the Arriva Wi-Fi, only for the bus from which I was getting a signal to drive off. I should have used something called Moovbox instead, which I worked out by a process of elimination, as the only one that did not disappear as we left the city centre.

Once at the ground, I started towards the the end of the pitch where our players were finishing warming up, which was the end we would be defending for the first half.

Andy Paxton

Once play started, I moved slowly up the touchline up to the end we were attacking.

Joe Herbert

The hosts had a strong team, most of whom looked quite well built, and scored after about 15 minutes, at which point I noticed I had not changed the setting on my camera from taking pictures in Durham, and had been shooting in raw. Having spent some time in these pages discussing issues with this, particularly buffering, I was surprised  I had not noticed. However, this was a lighter day than when I last tried, and I was using ISO values between 400 - 800 rather than 6400 and higher. This makes the file about 5MB smaller, so is quicker to save to the card and more can fit in the buffer. This sounds counter-intuitive, as you would expect more detail on a bright day, which is true with film, but with a digital file, size is increased by noise in the darker parts of the picture.

I am not sure I got the white balance right: it looked better when I let the camera do it when I had switched to shooting in jpeg.

Phil Bannister with my choice of white balance

Sam Staunton-Turner captured with the automated settings

An injury to Sam Staunton Turner after half an hour saw the return to action for James McCulloch, who had been out for a few weeks with a knee injury.

James McCulloch

Now the new website is up and running, one duty of the match day photographer is taking player profile pictures, although a quick glance round social media suggests they are quite able to select their own. Charlie Duke, on loan from Torquay duly obliged. I should point out Charlie is local, Torquay are not on the habit of lending their players to random clubs at the other end of the country.

Charlie Duke - photobomb by Andy Scarisbrick

We had hoped to take advantage of the slope in the second half, but the strength of a Spennymoor side firmly in a play off place took its toll, with the hosts scoring two further goals.

The light got brighter towards the end, producing a few odd reflections.

Danny Flood

With nothing much at stake, I made a fairly swift departure at the end, and was able to catch the bus in time for Evensong at Durham Cathedral. As for the salamanders in the title, you will find one on the top of the club and town crest.

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

Final score: Spennymoor Town 3 Prescot Cables 0