Aviva Premiership Final and England v Barbarians

Well that's about it for the UK football & rugby season. My last two rugby matches were both at Twickenham, first the Aviva Premiership final between Leicester and Northampton on Saturday closely followed by England against the Barbarians on Sunday.The weekend started on Thursday with the usual England open training session at Pennyhill Park hotel. It was very cold and more like February than May. On the plus side, it was overcast so nice soft & consistent light meant easy manual settings on the cameras. The Barbarians games always feel fairly low key compared to big internationals, and that was reflected in the media presence at the training session with only 4 photographers there rather than the usual 10-15. With many of the elite squad playing in the Premiership final, there were a lot of new faces and the big news was the appointment of Rob Webber as the captain. As a result he got a lot of attention from me and the other guys. With only 15 minutes available it's always rather manic to get stock shots of s many of the players as possible, whilst being sure to get the new guys and main newsworthy characters.Coverage of training in the press the following day was disappointing, with the Premiership final buildup taking the majority of the available column inches. Still, it's always good to cover the open training to get a feel for which players are on form, who is in the lineup for the game, and to recognise the new faces.Onto Saturday and the Aviva Premiership finals (my pictures on the Focus Images site here). With a 3pm kickoff I arrived on the motorbike at 12:30 and parked in what seems to be an interminably shrinking motorbike parking area which has to accommodate more and more bikes. Still, it's just 20 yards from the stadium entry so best not to moan.Being the biggest club game of the season, and in fact the biggest attendance ever at a club match of 81,703, the photographers' room under the stands was busy and I got the last available seat. I tend not to spend too much time in there anyway, so was straight out onto the pitch. Usually the head coach/director of rugby is out for a nosey about once they arrive at the stadium and I was able to get some nice shots of Northampton's Jim Mallinder and Leicester's Richard Cockerill. Northampton's skipper and England lock Tom Wood was looking particularly relaxed as he sat at the base of the posts and read through the match programme.The crowd was building and building and it was obviously a complete sellout. Twickenham is amazing when it's full, and a club game like this always seems to have a better atmosphere than the internationals (except for the bonkers victory over the All Blacks recently which was something else!). I decided to go with my well proven "fisheye on a pole" approach up in the crowd as the teams ran out onto the pitch, so went to the back of the 1st tier where I found another snapper lurking to do something similar (but without pole). I use my Olympus OM-D with 8mm fisheye on the end of my monopod, triggered with a cable release and with the tiltable screen tilted down so I could compose properly. I wanted to get the whole stadium in shot as it just looks cool, and putting the camera up above the crowd allowed me to get over the heads and the flags that were waving about. Anyway, nice pics resulted which I was happy with.Onto the game - a fast paced, fairly brutal affair. The light was very changeable, with that horrible bright sunlight & shadow, then shade from cloud, then bright sun again. Aaagh. After a while I stopped trying to adjust exposure each time and shot Av with +1/3 and tweaked any bad exposures in Lightroom with the exposure & shadows sliders. Excellent committed rugby by both sides. There were two major talking points in the game - the first was two late tackles by "human exocet" Courtney Lawes on Toby Flood. Having shot a fair bit of rugby, I try and resist following the ball the instant it is passed down the line and instead stay on the player a bit longer to capture any off-the-ball incidents. Lo and behold I got both late tackles nice & sharp and got them sent in quickly. This yielded prints in the Sunday Times and the Daily Express which cheered me up no end. Toby Flood had to leave the game after these two clatterings and Leicester were understandably hacked off to lose their captain.The other incident, and the main turning point of the game, was of course Northampton's Dylan Hartley getting sent off. The red card itself was over and done in a flash. Referee Wayne Barnes was clearly incensed and he yanked out the red, flashed it and I'm sure he'd have physically thrown Hartley off the pitch if he could have. Happily, following my own advice in my last post, I was watching what was going on through my viewfinder and hit the button. Annoyingly I was slightly too long on the 400 to get both feet and red card in shot and didn't have time to switch to vertical orientation, and obviously you have to ensure you get the card, so I ended up cropping at knee level.The pictures that made the papers were pretty much all from the sidelines as Hartley walked off wiping his face and kissing goodby to his Lions tour. I reminded myself that the "marquee" positions behind the try line in the corners, whilst yielding very nice try shots, are often not the best places to be for some of the key game moments.Anyhow the second half kicked off, Leicester won and the usual scramble for a good spot for the trophy lift took place. I found myself (on purpose I might add) lying prone righ in the centre to get a very low angle and shooting upwards whilst hordes of my colleagues threatened to tread on my crown jewels. Shoowing wide with a 24mm and longer with a 70-200 allowed me to get some nice variety. There then followed a secondary photocall where I decided to avoid the hordes and do the fisheye on a pole thing again to get the photographers in shot as well as the Leicester guys.Then is was the hysterical game of "chase the trophy" as the lap of honour began. At this point I decided not to take part as Mr Rogers had the prime on-pitch location and nailed all the key shots close in with the players as per usual. Instead I wandered back to my corner and waited for the trophy to come to me and got a few nice pics but missed Martin Castrogiovanni posing with a group of 10 fans who all has big stick on beards and frizzy hairdos - annoying as it was right behind me as I was shooting trophy pictures. Doh!Hyper fast O2 wifi saw all my remaining pics sent quickly and I was off for a cold beer and a pizza.Next up was the England game on the Sunday. I'd been reading an interesting article on composition, light and shade and decided to play about a bit before the game. Any big stadium will have interesting composition opportunities, and Twickenham is no exception. With bright sunlight outside, the entries to the stands were looking very interesting with a lot of contrast between light & shade. With a 24mm at f/8 and metered off the bright concrete, I thought I might get something interesting so took this picture.That's enough of that creative lark - lets get onto the pitch. With the top tier empty the atmosphere was quite flat and nobody seemed to want to get behind either team. Even the national anthem seemed a bit half hearted and there were 60,000 people in there. Such a contrast to the previous day. Very harsh lighting wasn't helping things either.For some reason, every try was in the wrong corner for me, so the game action was a little bit poor from my perspective. There were so many stoppages and the game seemed to be progressing so slowly that everyone in the stadium was getting frustrated. You know when the Mexican Wave kicks off that you've got a dull game on your hands.Worse was to come though when, during one particularly dull period of play, I felt a rush of air past my left ear and a strange thwacking sound as a totally naked (apart from his sunglasses) streaker ran onto the pitch. This was by far the most interesting moment of the match for everyone in the stadium (particularly the ladies I imagine as the guy was fairly well toned). He managed to run the full length of the pitch evading the portly bright orange shirted "fast response" team easily before surrendering at the far touch line. Bizarrely the game carried on as the orange shirts and the streaker dodged each other. I wont embed the pictures here for those faint of heart, but you can find them here (thankfully he was running the other way so no frontal shots).Somewhere along the line England won 40-12. Coverage the following day was dominated by Hartleygate so not much from this game in the papers which was a shame - I thought at least the streaker might get a print in the Sun or Star. Still, Stuart Lancaster was a happy man and England are well set for their mini tour of Argentina.So that's another season done. I've got a fair bit of fun stuff to do over the summer and I want to reinvigorate my weird world championships series which I've allowed to flounder a bit in the last 12 months. Before we know it the football season will be back on us and it'll all kick off again.