Not the Olympics
My Olympics coverage is restricted to the image above taken during an all-too-brief visit to watch the Synchronised 10m platform diving. It was all going so well until Daly & Waterfield's 4th dive. The crowd knew it was all over as they hit the water in a messy, unsynchronised way - you could almost feel the air thinning as everyone took a sharp intake of breath. Shame, but that's the way it goes. I was very impressed with the graciousness of the Chinese pair who were very dignified, controlled and above all, polite.The rest of my Olympics was spent watching the amazing TV coverage and spotting familiar faces getting squashed in various photography pits around the Olympic park. I'm pretty sure it was Adrian Dennis getting in front of the big Mr Bolt at the 200m finish. Also it was good to see Tony from the RFU getting the big job of keeping order on the track after each race.A couple of recent football friendlies have kept my eye in as the football season gears up again. It is surprising how quickly I get rusty after a couple of weeks without any football shooting. My reading of the game is fine, it's the timing that goes first and I found myself a few fractions off with headers and tackles. Still, Fulham v Norwich on Saturday should sort things out nicely.
Me and Mrs T also had a fortnight to ourselves in Iceland. I could happily spend weeks and weeks there exploring and photographing. What a place! Every turn brought some new, bafflingly weird landscape.
It's an impressive place for sure. We had a motorhome for the first half and a Land Rover Discovery for the second half. We went all over the place and had a thoroughly brilliant time throughout.
Following a good trial in the Faroe Islands, I was using an Olympus OM-D for the whole trip, having left all my bulky DSLR kit at home. This had the benefit of leaving more room in the bags for duty free on the way into Iceland as alcohol is a tad pricey over there. We were pleasantly surprised at the price of beer though, which was about the same as in Guildford (and about 2x stronger).
Once again the little OM-D performed very well. It's a pleasure to have such a dinky, lightweight yet fully featured camera for this sort of travel photography.
And it was also good to get a proper break from sports photography to recharge the batteries a bit. The only sport I engaged in was a spot of fly fishing, landing a total of 3 arctic char, 2 salmon and a trout. Superb "guerrilla" fishing in lovely, crystal clear streams. It's the sort of thing you could do a lovely photo-documentary of in fact. Now...there's an idea!
Oh, and inspired by Joe McNally, I shelled out for a bit more lighting kit and now have a Manfrotto convertible boom stand and an octabox to go on it. I had a play with some portraits over the weekend with decently acceptable results. More on this at a future date.
So, game on starting this weekend, and I've put myself down for QPR v Chelsea on the 15th of September - that'll be a fun game I'm sure. Onward into the cold, dark, wet winter...