Shocking green grass and a red ball

I spent last weekend in London, watching Dulwich Hamlet, and claiming my free pint from my friend John from the Southwark News for supplying a photo for the paper. The paper has a feature on their site that allows readers to purchase a PDF of a single issue of the paper, at a similar price to the print edition, so I can get a copy to see my handiwork in print without needing to take out a subscription.

London and the Home Counties have been enjoying (if you are out in it), or enduring (if you are trying to grow anything) a long spell of dry weather. This weekend was no exception, with bright sunshine, directly towards the Dog Kennel Hill end in the first half, giving the usual problems with haze and backlighting. We have looked before at how to compensate for the players being backlit, and the haze can be eliminated in the same way as fine rain. However, I sometimes find this leaves some of the colours over saturated, particularly the grass.

Take this shot of Dulwich's Dean Carpenter, firstly as it came off the camera (only cropped). The grass is already looking a bit lurid.

We can get rid of the haze using Levels, and adjusting highlights and shadows.

This, however, leaves the grass looking even more saturated, even after I have used the "less saturation" option. Working in jpeg, there is not a lot more I can do. Working in raw format would give more control over the white balance, but would also take more time, which is a consideration when producing a slide show for supporters whose interest in pictures of this game will wane at the point they set out to attend the next one, and for gentlemen of the press with papers to get out on Monday or Tuesday.

Kalvin Morath-Gibbs plays the red ball

Once again on a trip to Dulwich, I find myself commenting on the colour of the ball. As this was the weekend closest to the Sport Relief charity fundraising events, Ryman, the League sponsor, supplied a red ball. It is not universally popular, visibility can be an issue on a cloudy day, and some people feel it bounces higher than the regular ball. One supporter thought it was lighter - as the permitted weight for a football is 14-16oz (410-450g), this is quite possible, and would explain the bounce. Although the red ball has been used to support Sport Relief and Comic Relief for a number of years, another supporter (Pink Panther from the club forum, who has  a good memory for facts, and experience tells me is likely to be correct) said he has never seen a goal scored with it.

As only one ball is supplied, it inevitably ends up somewhere it is inconvenient to retrieve and is replaced by the regular ball, as happened a few minutes before half time. Almost immediately afterwards, Dulwich's Sol Pinnock scored the first goal.

Sol Pinnock moves towards goal with the regular ball

I normally leave pictures of the ground to the excellent Grounds for Concern blog, run by Mishi, the uncle of Kalvin Morath-Gibbs, but when someone points something out...

A few years ago I worked in Manchester with a Carlisle United supporter (who, like me, was from south east Surrey) during Carlisle's season in the Conference. It was clear quite quickly they were only going to be with us in the non League game for a year, and he seemed to have occasional difficulty adjusting to the facilities. He came away from a couple of away games complaining they did not have any toilets - for the avoidance of doubt, they are a requirement of all levels of FA ground grading, down to County League level. He would have no such issue at Dulwich, as we seem to be starting a small collection of signs to send people in the right direction (best counted in full screen).

Anyone know the way to the lavs?

The second half was much easier, nice warm sun on my back, the regular ball, and near-perfect lighting for the game, so I hardly needed to make any changes to the lighting when setting up the slideshow.

Francis Duku identifies a target for his free kick

I normally select about two thirds of the slideshow from the first half: when I come to the second half pictures, they are often very similar to the first half, and I have a few shots of most of the players. In this case, because of the lighting issues in the first half, the proportion was reversed.

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.