Brazil Day 2 - Waiting and training and melting
5 taxis1 face to face with Roy Hodgson1 fan scrum34 Celcius£16,000 of loan gear blagged2 open training sessions1 press conference
The day started early after 6 hours much needed sleep. I thought I'd get up and look at the dawn but missed it by about half an hour. Still, it was quite nice from the top of my hotel.
With my FIFA media extranet calendar reminder popping up in my inbox I could see that my day wasn't going to start "for real" until 4:30 when England were scheduled to have their open training session and press conference at the stadium, followed by Italy doing the same. So, what to do? I thought I might as well head over to the England hotel a couple of km away to see if anything was happening there.
Having slathered myself with factor 30 I jumped in a taxi and made it over there without incident. Lo and behold there was a scrum of people looking at the front door of the hotel, but nothing obvious happening. A couple of camera crew were there but no news photographers or paps which I thought a bit unusual. Still, with nothing to do why not hang out there for a while and practice taking pictures of things. I just had my Sony A7R with me and 21mm, 50mm and 90mm lenses, all manual focus.
We waited and waited, and a crowd always draws a crowd so there was a growing number of people building up, and yet nobody actually knew if England were in the hotel or not. Might as well wait around a bit more and see what happens. It was pretty hot - I'd say 34C or so in the shade, quite high humidity and absolutely baking in the sunshine. Lots of honking cars were going by with Brazil flags flying - they are really getting into it over here, don't beleive all you see in the media.I thought about chucking it in and heading up to the stadium, but elected to hang on a bit longer until my bottle of water was drained. Cameramen were shooting the crowd and other cameramen were shooting them, and it was generally very good fun if a little weird.
Then, activity. A red tape thing and two cones were dragged across the access drive to the hotel. A posh looking FIFA liveried car drove up. People craned their necks to get a better look. Cellphones were raised, thumbs at the ready. And some unknown dude that was probably a sponsor got out and went into the hotel. Waiting resumed. Were England there or had they gone out training early to fool everyone?Then, more activity. Over 2 hours into my vigil a smallish bus arrived. A bus must mean that people were going to get on the bus, and those people must be the England team. Before I could react, Roy Hodgson came wandering out, straight to the crowd of waiting fans (mostly Brazilian I should add) who went crazy. Roy was brilliant - joking, smiling, having selfies taken, signing autographs etc etc for ages. Brilliant - what a guy. None of this standoffishness. The Brazilians loved it. Top work Roy - that's the way to win over the local folks. He kept at it in the blazing heat for 10-15 minutes as the players got on the coach almost un-noticed around the back (so maybe Roy was a distraction, but he genuinely seemed to be having a good time). 
Off they went for a tour of Manaus. Tricky to do when you've got all the curtains closed, but there you are. I shot off back to the hotel to wire some of my pics as quickly as I could, then it was off to the stadium to get ready for the training sessions.
At the stadium you have to put yourself and all your gear through a scanner. They picked up on my Pocket Wizard radio triggers and told me I had to go and get them approved for use in the stadium. Fair enough. I was escorted off into a portakabin where about 20 people were crammed in testing radio mikes, TV camera transmitters etc etc. They quickly started helping me out, running all sorts of odd electrical scanning stuff around the Pocket Wizards.After some time, and confusion where they asked me what frequency they used (I don't know!), they passed them fit for use and put stickers on them. Excellent - another thing done, and glad to get it done a day early rather than queue up on match day.
Once in the media centre (much busier than yesterday) I thought I might as well try and borrow some camera kit seeing as I don't quite have enough of it with me. I popped over to the Canon service desk where they will give my cameras a service tomorrow morning, and I asked if I could borrow a 1DX and 200-400 f/4 zoom. Amazingly I had them in my hands a mere 2 minutes later. That was too easy surely! Some fiddling then ensued to set the 1DX up how I like it, and it'll get used at the training sessions later on. The 200-400 is so light - lovely.
The media centre also has big lockers for photographers which is excellent news, and I even bought padlocks with me!After figuring out how the 1DX works and getting some decent settings into it, I was off to the press conference centre inside the stadium. Gerrard and Hodgson were to do a Q&A with the great and good of the media. The place was packed. I got in earlyish and bagged a seat at the front. The front row was reserved for photographers. We were allowed to stay for the first 2 questions, after which all the photographers were asked to leave, probably due to the unholy racket 50 pro camera bodies create at 10+ frames per second. You can see the press conference pics here on the Focus Images web site, and a couple of samples for you below.
I do like this 1DX 200-400 combo. It really is very flexible. The 1DX seems to go to whatever ISO you want, and having a zoom on such a long lens is very useful. It's also very convenient to slide the lever to put the built-in 1.4x teleconverter into place. The max aperture drops to f/5.6 but you just need to crank the ISO up a bit more and you're sorted. Fantastic.Then it was out onto the pitch for the England training session. You can see the pictures here on the Focus Images site. We were allowed to go anywhere on the 3 sides of the pitch that aren't the tunnel side, so good freedom of movement. We only had 15 mins so had to be fairly quick. Firstly though I made use of my £2.99 thermometer again.
Shortly before the players were due to come out, I noticed that all the cones had been set up at the far side of the pitch from lazy corner (the corner the photographers usually enter the stadium from). I legged it under the stadium perimeter and popped up at the other end accompanied by only 3 or 4 other photographers, with the masses still at the initial end. Excellent!And so that's exactly what happened - the players came down my end and it was a veritable feast of photography. And boy was it hot. The players were obviously feeling it.
It's quite tricky in a session like this to know what to focus on. It's tempting to just spray away and send huge numbers of pictures of everyone, but one has to resist. I reckoned there would be news about Sterling and Rooney, so put a bit of time into them, but it's just guesswork really. Rooney did look a bit out of sorts to my eyes - a bit apart from everyone else for some reason.
By the end the sweat was pouring off me and I was thirsty having finished off my water (must take 4 bottles to the game tomorrow night) and knackered. Back into the cool of the press centre and a big editing job as I had a pile of pics to get through. Edit edit edit. And then edit some more. Send send send. Thankfully the comms are working reallty well here, and my little USB-powered TP-LINK wifi router is a roaring success. Having a wifi connection that all my devices can use which is connected to my own wired link means the reliance on the stadium wifi isn't required, which is great as it's been slowing down a bit at busy times.Then off again to do the Italy open training session. They sort of wandered out onto the pitch and messed about a bit, standing in a circle with two in the middle trying to get the ball as those around the outside passed it about. Balotelli made for some good pics as usual (not up on the website at the time of writing) and I got some nice stuff of Pirlo and Marchisio.I thought I might as well stay in the media centre to write this post up as the comms are much better than the hotel. That's it for now though - off for a pizza and beer. Unfortunately I had to give the 1DX and 200-400 back. Sadness.