Words of Wisdom, and London Rugby 7's

I was reading through the Canon email blurb that I receive every now and then, and by way of lazy hyperlink hopping I came across Getty's Andrew Redington who was reviewing the new 200-400 Canon lens (£10k - ouch!!). He wrote that the best advice he'd been given came from Ross Kinnaird and was; "if you see something happening, make sure you have your camera to your eye so you are following it, rather than just looking at it.”I thought how totally and utterly correct that advice is, and how it resonated with me. I have lost count of the number of times I've seen something dramatic/important happen, watched it happen, and then tried to figure out why my brain was so dead as to not have photographed it. Whilst there's an obvious balance to be achieved between having your camera to your eye all the time versus not going blind from eye strain, I have found that it's too easy to err on the wrong side of that balance and miss things.I often remark to others how good some photographers are (David Rogers, rugby photographer extraordinare springs to mind) and how they always seem to be getting the pictures no matter what. I think a lot of this is to do with sheer familiarity with your subject matter and the ability to anticipate action and be ready for it. That is no doubt of huge importance. But the fact that you've got the concentration levels to keep your eye to the viewfinder and be shooting what happens as it happens, and not be distracted, is absolutely key.This is something I found out while shooting the London Rugby 7s at Twickenham last weekend, when I was being severely distracted by ladies in the crowd wearing very short skirts. However, remembering these words of wisdom I shot what I saw, which brightened my day up considerably.So the Rugby 7's is a cracking tournament with teams from all over the world competing in a globe-trotting series spanning the northern hemisphere winter season. New Zealand are the undisputed kings (as usual). Teams of 7 a side play on a full sized pitch, with halves of 7 minutes each way, 10 in the final. The huge space on the pitch results in fast, exciting running rugby. Scrums are 3-a-side and mercifully fast compared to the endless resets and penalties in the 15-a-side game, so it's all action all the time. Even conversions are taken as drop kicks to speed things up.With games and players rolling on & off constantly throughout the 2 day event, photographing it and keeping track can be a nightmare, made worse by the fact that shirt numbers often don't match the programme. For this reason, and having learnt from last year's event, I arrived at midday on the Sunday after skipping the Saturday games. Incorporated into this year's event, just to make things more confusing, was a womens' invitational 7s tournament, and the play-offs to select which teams would enter the "core group" of teams that make up the international men's series. Happily our ladies won, beating Australia with a very healthy 36-7 scoreline. Blimey they don't mess around - there's some serious action on the field when the women play, and the England ladies are particularly athletic and powerful.So, captioning everything turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. Team sheets from each game are printed out in the photographers' room after the event, so to be sure of the players names you have to obviously shoot a back shot to get their number, and then check it against the sheet for that game. One day rugby players will have numbers on the front of their shorts - please!Knowing their wouldn't be a massive clamour for pictures from the national papers unless the England men won (sorry ladies) I concentrated on getting a few key pictures of each game, trying to translate as much of the atmosphere of the crazy, inebriated crowd as possible, and ensuring I got the main trophy presentations and team shots. Probably the happiest team in the stadium was the Spanish, who won the play-offs to get into the core group next season. They beat their arch rivals Portugal 10-5 to do so, with a last minute try as well. They were leaping about like crazy people. England men pushed on to a semi-final place but lost out sadly to Australia in a tight game, with the score 7-14. There was some excellent rugby played by the England team - nice, fluid, fast & powerful. And the Aussies got beat by New Zealand in the final so maybe we shouldn't feel too bad.As the day wore on, it went from sunny and warm to really quite cold, with rain falling. This resulted in the crowd thinning out considerably which was a bit of a shame as the best match was still to come in the mens final. There were still big chunks of lively supporters shouting and waving about though, testament to the organisers who keep everything moving with competitions, prizes and all sorts of nuttiness.I was keeping track of all the games by shooting the scoreboard as each match started so I'd have a record of who was playing. I'd lock that scoreboard picture in the camera so it would be ingested into Lightroom in the right sequence. As each game was in progress, I'd get a number of action sequences with back shots, and lock a few of those while being careful not to end up with too many shots. I think I had a total of 1400 images from the whole day, with 25 sent to the papers and 144 in total in my library. The worst thing is overshooting and having to go through too many pictures to caption them all properly, so economy is the name of the game (while keeping camera to eye of course!!). To keep on top of things I edited, captioned and sent during breaks in the action to avoid having a big mass of pictures to go through at the end.To get a different perspective, I went up to the gantry and shot down on a couple of games. I quite like this look as you get a completely clean background using a long lens as it's just looking down onto green grass. I stayed up there to shoot the Fiji Plate presentation (like a losers final) just to get a different view of proceedings. Seeing as the photographers down there were using flashes, I thought I'd try and catch a flash or two so set up at 1/25th of a second and let the image stabilisation on my 70-200 to it's thing.By this point in the day I was looking for anything interesting to keep my mind engaged and whilst photographing New Zealand coach Gordon Tietjens I found something interesting on one of the players wristbands. Usually these are used to hold details of lineouts or other tactics - not so here.Anyway, eventually there was a final. New Zealand v Australia and a very fast paced high scoring game. Unsurprisingly New Zealand won 47-12 to take the tournament and also to reinforce their place as the overall series winners. A rather bizarre double presentation followed, one trophy for the London tournament with the relevant advertising background, and one for the series with a different background and a different trophy. Thankfully Tony had us all briefed beforehand and his usual impeccable operation ensured we were all where we had to be at the right time.As the stadium had emptied by the time the last presentation took place, I went up into the stands just above the tunnel to shoot the New Zealand trophy lift and avoid a background of empty seating. I'll try this again in the future as it got me above the melee of the other photographers and produced a nice image or two.To the delight of the women who remained in the stands, they then stripped off their shirts and did a topless Haka. To be honest it was pretty impressive. I think we need something like that, but preferably not morris dancing.

And so that was that. A quick edit of a selection of my remaining pictures and that was me done. Overall, a bit of a tough gig if you've got to be there for both days, and stay focused throughout. Great fun though, with a bonkers crowd that seems to be growing in size year on year. The London 7s are becoming a bit of an institution, rather like the Big Game premiership match between Christmas & new year.

My next rugby is the England v Barbarians game, possibly with the Premiership final the day before. Just got the last of the Permier League football to go before that which will see me at Chelsea v Everton for the last match of the two managers.