Not quite so lucky this time, and a new laptop

Lashing rain accompanied me on my ride to Twickenham yesterday to cover the England v Argentina match. It wasn't just raining a bit, it was chucking it down. I suspected it wasn't going to be my day. With a long brief to shoot, arriving at the ground soaking wet isn't generally a good start.First off was a visit to the Twickenham train station to shoot various crowd pictures, trains arriving full of supporters etc. This involved trekking against the flow of humanity in more pouring rain before blagging my way onto the platform without a ticket thanks to a very understanding South West Trains chap. Trying to manufacture a beautifully composed picture containing a train, lots of people, and a sign saying "Twickenham" while not getting crushed was tricky to say the least, but you do what you can with what's available. I ended up with a variety of wide and long options that should do the trick.Then back to the stadium with thousands of people and the odd policeman and police horse for company. It was time to double-check that all my kit was ready to go, in particular the new laptop I had in the bag. To date I've been using a Samsung Series 9 ultrabook which is slim and light, though a tad sluggish at times. As with pretty much anything with a rechargeable battery in it, the battery no longer holds charge in the way it used to. In fact, it would struggle to get through 90 minutes on full power which is pretty poor obviously. So a new alternative was required. Why on earth don't manufacturers make laptops with exchangeable batteries? So cynical of them.Seeing as it would be my only laptop and would have to do lots of things, not just edit pictures, I looked at convertibles that I could also use as a tablet. One thing lead to another and I was offered a deal I couldn't refuse on a Lenovo Helix. This has the main computing gubbins built into the screen/tablet but, and a detachable keyboard. The whole thing folds up like a compact laptop or you can just use the tablet bit when lying on the sofa.There is one massive benefit of the Lenovo which is that it has two batteries. The one in the screen is the main one, and there's also another one in the keyboard unit. This gives it very good battery life as it uses up the keyboard battery first before depleting the main battery.Another cool thing about it is that the screen contains a full Wacom digitiser, with a pen housed in the screen unit. This means that you can use it as a pukka graphics tablet if you want to, as well as handwriting emails which always elicits an amusing reaction from the recipient.With Lightroom, Autocopy (for automatically loading locked images) and Autoreplace (for captioning) installed, along with Filezilla, I was all good to go. I can happily report that the Helix performed really well and was much snappier for editing than the Samsung. It does have a very high resolution screen though which looks fab but makes clicking on the Lightroom sliders a bit tricky in the heat of battle.Onto the match itself. I opted for a slot on the left side of the try line, bargaining on a Chris Ashton try (he was on the right wing). Ashton is always good for a picture or two when he's on form. In a pretty active and free scoring first half, Joe Launchbury got a cracking try under a pile of bodies after a massive effort from the forwards, followed by another one for Billy Twelvetrees, also under a pile of bodies, so no really decent pictures there unfortunately. Ashton escaped a couple of times and was held up with his first effort though that gave a very cool shot (below). He then got in and scored, leaving out the swallow dive for a change. I got a nice sequence of frames of the try itself, but then Ashton carried on a bit too far and his celebration was behind the 3D camera to my left. I'd left what I thought was enough of a gap between me and the camera but hadn't quite gambled on any action coming quite as far down the pitch to be blocked. Lo and behold Ashton's celebration was in all the papers this morning. Oh well!The second half began with a game of "hunt the Beckham". Rumour had it that he was in the ground so the search began. Luckily the match itself was pretty quiet at this point as England hardly got hold of the ball, allowing a good survey of the executive boxes to take place. After some fruitless scanning, his picture came up on the big screen letting me and a few others pinpoint him and snap off a few frames of the man himself with his 3 boys. He did look a bit lonely though with nobody else in the box with him. He got a big cheer from the crowd as he waved and smiled.Shortly after this, the rear screen on my 1D Mark IV decided to fail YET AGAIN. This is the second time and it must be rain related although the camera had been dry for a few hours by now. I'd only just got it back from Canon after spending £130 on a new screen. The camera got a bit wet during my trip down to the train station, but these cameras are meant to handle that sort of thing. It's amazing how hard it is to shoot in the usual way without a rear screen as you cant check your exposure or mark your best shots for download.I ended up swapping cards between camera bodies and doing my selecting on the 1D Mark III. I also ran the Mark IV in aperture priority with a bit of positive exposure compensation rather than running it in manual due to the inability to check exposure easily. It was all a bit like being back with film again. It's just extremely frustrating when things don't work, especially when they are meant to have just been fixed.Back to the game. I'd elected to position myself between the posts rather than at one or other of the ends of the tryline for the second half. My logic was that England would run riot and Ashton would swallow dive between the posts. 3 or 4 remote cameras were also placed there along with a couple of other guys either side of me. In the end it wasn't Ashton at all, but rather the somewhat less elegant figure of Ben Morgan booming over the line after slipping a couple of big hits to score England's 4th try right in front of me. A nice celebration followed which made up for missing the Ashton shot.With the rest of the match being a fairly quiet affair, as you can tell when the crowd start doing Mexican waves, there was plenty of time to send all my selected shots away. Happily England ran out 31-12 winners, though the second half was decidedly odd as though they had got a bit bored of the whole thing.With the presentation of what has to be the most curiously designed trophy I've ever seen, it was off to shoot the remainder of my brief and finish up for the day with the player appearances and Q&A in the O2 Blueroom. I'm always completely amazed that the guys do these sessions, as they've just smashed themselves about for 80 minutes before getting suited and booted to have a chat to the fans. I know it comes with the territory, so hats off to them for being very professional as well as very friendly and accommodating with everyone the came into contact with.Next week is a different sort of challenge altogether as the All Blacks roll into town. After beating them last time out, expectations will be high but it's going to be tough. Very tough.