Black and blue and noisy

Firstly, major kudos to Canon Professional Services for repairing my 1D mark IV in double quick time last week. I posted the camera off to them on Monday, had an acknowledgement that it had arrived on Tuesday, confirmation it had been repaired and dispatched on Wednesday, and it was back with me on Thursday. Happily it was all working beautifully, and there was no charge as they were re-doing the rear screen repair under guarantee as they had done the same repair a couple of months earlier.Last week seemed to be the week where faulty cameras came back to me, as my lovely little Sony RX100 mark II came back as well. I'd taken it back to London Camera Exchange as it had 2 large dust spots on the sensor. Where these came from is anybody's guess, as it's not an interchangeable lens camera. So that was repaired under warranty as well and came back yesterday. It really is a very nice little camera with excellent image quality. If you're after a small pocketable quality with a fast lens and good output do have a look at one.Anyhow...I really thought England were going to win on Saturday at Twickenham. The atmosphere was sensational. After everyone was stunned into silence with the early New Zealand try, no doubt thinking we were in for a 50 point drubbing, there came several minutes of magic. Having been awarded a penalty inside the All Blacks 22, rather than going the safe option and kicking for 3 points, Robshaw and the boys bashed it into touch for a lineout, showing real intent to take the fight to New Zealand. From my hazy recollection, they did this about 3 times in succession, with the England pack smashing the All Blacks again and again until they pushed over. From what I could see it was a try but I was 40 yards away on the 400 in the other corner. That was disallowed but the intent was clear - England were going balls-out to take it to the New Zealanders. We were in for a cracking game and the crowd knew it too.It's times like this when you get to feel the full force of 82,000 people shouting their heads off. It's a massive privilege to be pitchside in the middle of the cauldron of noise. Makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, make no mistake. Keeping your concentration on getting the shot, the exposure, the framing, the edit & captioning etc etc whilst the blood is pumping is very challenging for me. Having covered every Twickenham home game for years now it's something I still haven't got used to, but then again it is rare for the atmosphere to be quite as intense as it was on Saturday. Often it can be quite flat like the second half against Argentina last week, but every now and then everything goes bonkers and it's as though the crowd are creating a massive wave of noise to force the home team over the line. The last time I heard anything like it was the England win against the All Blacks a year ago, where a crazy 15 minutes resulted in 3 England tries and the whole place went ballistic. It really is sensational.After a period of sustained pressure in that corner, the big dude Joe Launchbury dived on a ball that popped out of a ruck and, helped by the ever present Chris Robshaw, lunged over the line for England's first try. Richie McCaw was for once caught out as Launchbury speared past him, with Robshaw very quick wittedly inserting himself between McCaw and Launchbury.Thankfully the referee decided to look at the replay which gave me time to get the sequence out of the camera and onto my laptop. I've got to say that I'm very pleased with the performance of the Lenovo Helix that I'm using. It's way faster than the i5 Samsung I had previously even though it's supposedly got the same i5 processor. As a result, I had the shots on the laptop, edited, captioned and sent out before the video ref had finished his analysis and awarded the try. I was using my phone as a hotspot running on O2 which has mega HSDPA coverage in the stadium - soon to be 4G I hope. It's so nice to not have to struggle with the tech stuff.One of the more amusing moments was Ben Foden hurtling down the pitch with a Kiwi or two in his wake, roaring in triumph as he got to the line to score. I actually thought he was going to do an Ash Splash under the posts. Unfortunately the referee had ruled an offside so it didn't count, but it made for a cracking picture. Poor Ben - he thought Christmas had come early as he threw the ball in the air and celebrated in proper fashion.I should add at this point that the early morning was sunny and warm. This meant getting to Twickenham at 09:30 to run through a re-shoot of numerous promotional & sponsorship pictures with blue skies and sunshine, as the last two weekends have been dull and wet. It makes a lot of difference having a bit of sunshine to perk things up. People are also much happier and more than willing (if asked nicely) to have their picture taken.Another tour of the England changing rooms followed as I was unable to shoot the bath area last time as it was full of kit and assorted paraphernalia. The professionalism of the RFU backroom staff is amazing. There's a bunch of competition winners and associated hangers-on (me included) wandering through the inner sanctum a few hours before the game as they are trying to get themselves prepared, and they just get on with it without complaining and actually being extremely helpful throughout.Anyway, back to the game. Sorry for jumping around chronologically, it's all just an endless stream of consciousness blurting out of my brain in no specific order. Some of the more alert photographers of which I don't include myself had made specific requests to shoot the Haka from a high vantage position. Having seen Eddie Keogh's pictures in numerous of the papers this was obviously a very good move as, aside from being down on the pitch with them this was the best vantage point. Typically I was at the wrong end for it (4th NZ game in a row!) but I thought it was quite nice to get the England players facing up to the Kiwis. Well, obviously it was the only shot I was going to get! Shoot it long, shoot it wide. Basically make the most of what you've got. I quite like this one with the crowd and the vomitcam in shot.What none of us liked was the smoke from the pyrotechnics that hangs over the pitch for the first five minutes of every game. All the pictures look washed out as a result, but thankfully some major contrast and black level adjustments in Lightroom can bring them back to a semblance of normality.After being something like 17 points down, England miraculously worked their way into a 22-20 lead. You could really feel the immense effort the team were putting into the game - they were going for it big time.It seemed like the immense effort took its toll though, as those crafty Kiwis got the upper hand in the last quarter of the game and ran in another try to seal the game 22-30. There had been a sweepstake in the photographers' room before the game to guess the score. I have to admit that I went for 16-32 so not very patriotic, and the vast majority of predictions were for an All Blacks win. I must find out who won.With the majority of the play at the other end towards the close of the game I had time to work through some more pictures and get them sent off. It's very noticeable how dark it gets at Twickenham when shooting from the ends. With all the lighting coming from the sides, faces are often shadowed, and it's very tricky to get the exposure spot on. I ended up at ISO3200, f/2.8 and 1/800th by the end of the game, and the pictures out of my 1D mark III are pretty noisy by that point. My rejects bin was rather large as a result. Those that were sharp and crispy enough get some de-noise treatment in Lightroom, followed by some quite strong sharpening to offset the de-noising, and with "masking" set fairly high in the sharpening settings. The masking function restricts the areas that the sharpening is applied to - if you hold down the ALT key and slide the masking slider you can see what it is doing. It basically stops the pictures from looking over-sharpened. I do have a preset that does this for me automatically but you can only apply it after you've done your cropping etc. because LR does slow down its rendering when you select the crop tool if applying a preset to the image. It only adds 2-3 seconds to the workflow but that's long enough to get very annoying, so apply your sharpening presets after your cropping folks.After the final whistle it was a quick jog around to the tunnel after switching the 400 for my 24 1.4 and grabbing a flash. I wanted a picture of the England team looking battered, bruised and dejected so got myself into position to shoot down the tunnel of players that they always make after a rugby match (much more sporting than those footballers). I squeezed off a few shots with the 70-200 as Chris Robshaw came through and saw that he had the most massive black eye I've ever seen. What a whopper. I marked that to send in along with the trophy presentation pictures. The Hilary Shield brought a welcome return to sensible trophy design after the previous week's curious concoction. Kudos to the Kiwis for playing out of their skin to win it. They really are a force to be reckoned with.I didn't bother with the Dan Carter 100th cap presentation as I knew that would be very well covered by all the big agencies, so got myself back to my spot to send in the remainder of my pics as the stadium emptied around me. I always like to stay out pitchside if it's not raining as it saves 3 minutes it takes to walk around and back into the photographers' room, and another couple of minutes setting everything up once you're in there. 5 minutes is a long time - I'll have edited and sent another 10 pictures in that time.Once all the pics were away, I did go back inside to warm up and have a bite to eat before whizzing off again to do more sponsor pics up in the corporate boxes, and then it was away on the motorbike to a well earned cold beer.  Lovely.