Brazil Day 13 - Costa Rica v England

25 Jun

As usual, click a picture to get to the gallery. It take me ages to make it do that. Note all pics inside stadia and press conferences are copyright Focus Images - no usage permitted without payment.The noise from party-central outside last night was so loud and continuous it just merged into a sort of jet aircraft roar, which meant I could get some sleep as it was a bit like being on a plane. Only the occasional local vuvuzela type thing sounding off disturbed me.Right now I'm stuck in a massive traffic jam in Belo Horizonte in a media coach heading back to my hotel. The whole place seems to have ground to a halt after the game today so it's all very slow. An excellent time to catch up on the blog.We were up and away promptly to get the 8:15am media bus from the hotel around the corner to the stadium. These media buses are excellent and are saving me a fortune in taxi fares. Very comfortable as well, and never full so I have always had two seats to myself. We found ourselves inexplicably behind another media bus (there are two routes in Belo) which caused some angst - if the other bus got there ahead of us we'd be somewhat badly placed in the queue for a photo position. Not the plan I had in mind.Right at the stadium though the other bus parked up about 100 meters from the entrance, and our bus kept going right to it so we managed to jump ahead. Such small victories are the spice of life! I got myself into 2nd place in the queue which was excellent. Ben and I had spent some time analysing the sun's arc during the day and worked out that the manager's side, on the right as the TV looks at it, was the place to be, so I got seat 245 which was exactly there. This meant that we'd be in full sun for most of the game, but the stands behind the play would be shaded which results in much better looking pictures as the players are rim-lit and stand out nicely.The downside was that the first three-quarters of the game were spent in the full glare of the sun. I had long trousers and long sleeves on and a hat to keep the sun off, and factor 30 on the rest of me. I'm not keen on getting sunburnt at all. Happily the FIFA volunteers, of whom there are hundreds, were excellent and they kept bringing cold water around to us. The volunteers are real stars of the tournament in my eyes and are always most helpful.I elected to get a loan 200-400 and 1DX again from the nice Canon man. I wasn't happy with the output from my 1DIII in the last game, also in bright sunlight so everything was very contrasty. Cameras don't seem to like highly contrasty scenes and my 1DIII was struggling to hold accurate focus. For a game like this I didn't want to take any chances, so loan gear it was.After doing some shots of the stadium from across the lake, it was time to go out on pitch (2 hours ahead of kick off). We all knew Prince Harry was going to be there so everyone was prepped to keep an eye out for him. When I told the Brazilians who bought me dinner last night that Prince Harry was going to be at the game they said "The Naked Prince" and laughed a lot.I had the pleasure of Focus Images GLOBAL EDITORIAL DIRECTOR in London again who was standing by to edit and caption my pictured for me. Today it all worked like a dream. Comms were very good throughout and the pictures fairly flew out. It's hard to underestimate the importance of this capability as it means I can concentrate 100% on the game and (hopefully) not miss anything. I also had my setup optimised as well, with a longer USB cable so I could keep my card reader tucked just under my leg making it easy to pop a card out and slot it in the reader one-handed. A small thing but it does make a difference.While harsh lighting is a real pain, it can offer up opportunities as well, especially when you have a relatively dark background. Deliberate underexposure was the order of the day for some more interesting looking player shots.With clouds wandering past above, and the shadow on the pitch moving inexorably across, there was no way I was going to try manual exposure. There would have been just too much potential for error. So instead I put the cameras onto shutter priority mode, selected 1/1600th and auto ISO, and set the cameras so that they would limit the amount the aperture would close down. This means that I would ensure I kept a nice high shutter speed, and the camera would sort out the ISO and aperture itself, but maintain as wide an aperture as possible to keep the background blurred out. I then used exposure compensation to vary things as required, so 1 and 2/3rds stops down for the rim-lit stuff for example, and generally 1/3rd of a stop up to avoid the England white shirts resulting in underexposure.All that worked very nicely. I also finally worked out how to use the 200-400 lens. It has a built-in 1.4x extender, so rather than use it as a 200-400 I left the extender permanently in place so I had a 280-560mm zoom. The max aperture drops to 5.6 with the extender in place but it was plenty bright enough not to worry about that, the only ill effect being the slightly less blurred background. Using it like this, I had my normal-ish trigger to change from the long lens to the shorter 70-200 in good time to ensure I didn't miss anything. I could also get quite close to the other goal mouth with it too, and the flexibility of having a zoom was really useful. The results, even with the extender in place, were really excellent - nice and sharp. I would really like one of these, but they are EXPENSIVE at over £10,000!As well as the rim-lit pictures, I also tried a few slow shutter panned shots. These are really tricky, as you've got to be beteen 1/60th and 1/125th to get the impression of motion, and generally they turn out to be absolutely rubbish. The problem is that people bob up and down when they are running, unlike cars which go along fairly smoothly on a flat surface. When it works, it's great, but it's generally a bit of a lottery and you have to watch out for accidentally leaving the camera at 1/60th which isn't so good for "stop the motion" action.Into the second half, the shade came over to get the sun fof me which was a great relief. Everything had been getting very hot. England failed to score as you know, but came close a few times. The working area is so tight that it's very tricky to get everything in position and sorted out so you're not blocked by the guy sitting next to you, but in general we all get on pretty well and everyone tries their best to make room for everyone else.With the game droning on I was looking for any decent pictures of Prince Harry, and shot a few that were half decent. I suspect he was wondering why he'd travelled so far to see a goalless draw. Anyway, there weren't any as he's far too well trained. I didn't even see him yawning.Things got much more interesting in the last 10 minutes though as some trouble kicked off between the block of England fans behind and to the right of me, and the largely Costa Rican fans right behind me. It was fairly harmless shouting and some cups of something were being thrown about, but very poor form regarless. It was interesting to see the reaction of all the rest of the crowd who gave the England fans a good boo-ing. The riot police were in pronto though. Before you knew it there were well armed, helmeted guys with riot shields standing between the England fans and everyone else. Trying to get shots of that lot kicking off while England were desperately trying to get a goal in the last few minutes was a juggling act, trying not to knock fellow snappers on the head with my long lens as I switched between the play in front and the shenanigans behind. The riot squad up in the stands did a good job of keeping things under control, shotguns at the ready.When the game, and England's World Cup adventure, finally fizzled to a dull and predictable outcome, a group of England fans decided they weren't going to leave and started their "we're not going home, we're not going home, we're not we're not we're not going home", though probably without the punctuation. In short order, the GUYS YOU DON'T MESS WITH arrived pitchside.Oops - so engrossed was I in writing this I just missed my bus stop and had to get the driver to let me off a bit further down the road (but closer to my hotel happily). Back in my room now, and it's party time outside again by the sound of it.Anyway, the GUYS YOU DON'T MESS WITH - they are tooled up fast response SWAT types with helmets, visors, shotguns etc. The formed a rank in front of the England fans and those photographers who hadn't headed off to the media centre tried to get interesting pictures of them without getting shot. Thankfully there were no dogs. They were quite amenable to having their pictures taken - either that or they had been ordered not to move. I caught one chap's eye and smiled and did a "oh dear, sorry about our fans" sort of shrug and he smiled and shrugged back. Anyhow, they provided for some interesting pics, far more so than the game itself. Much to-ing and fro-ing was required to get the correct skull-like grin from the England fans reflected in the visor of my chosen terminator. I did a selection of shots then moved away to get a longer picture of the corralled England lot finally submitting to the inevitable and leaving the stadium. What they thought they were doing is anyone's guess. To their great credit, the police (both the initial riot squad and the "special" police) jsut stood there and looked at the England fans. They were very well drilled and simply imposed order by their presence. Excellently done.Tomorrow is a flight back to Rio, and I need to submit my request for the Columbia v Uruguay game on the 28th in Rio. I have a bunch of Skype calls to do on Thursday but am looking forward to a day off on Friday where you'll probably find me near a beach.Oh, and for those who read to the bottom, here's a bonus pic as featured on the Sunday Times website (and hopefully coming to a print edition near you this Sunday).