Brazil Day 14 - Ecuador v France in Rio

It feels like today began a very long time ago in Belo Horizonte. With little sleep due to the bars outside remaining open until 05:00 and filled with drunken fans of all denominations, and then the street cleaners rocking up at 05:01, I thought I might as well head to the airport early to see if I could get to Rio in time for the Ecuador v France game kicking off at 5pm. I also had a bit of a drink last night as I met 3 very nice English people at the restaurant over the road from my hotel. I think it was Mike, Graham and Sally, and they bought me dinner and some number of native Brazilian cocktails the name of which I have forgotten, but were basically alcohol plus sugar plus lime. Tasty indeed. This was extremely kind of them and the refused all attempts to pay, even dousing my money in Sally's Baileys which was accidentally spilt. I had to launder the money in my hotel wash basin. Hopefully we'll meet again in Rio where they were headed for a few days R&R.After another strange breakfast in the hotel - sort of conflakes and granola, and an orange (Mrs T please note) I was into a taxi for the long 40km drive to the international airport. To save money, I could have got a media bus to the stadium, then a short taxi to the little airport nearby, then an airport bus to the international airport, but that sounded much too hard work. My taxi cost R$120 which is about £35 so still cheaper than Guildford to Heathrow.I should have started writing about my taxi drivers earlier. You could do a novel on each one. Today's was 46 years old and had a 21 year old son who is a jujitsu instructor. He constantly left the indicator on, and after pointing it out a couple of times I couldn't bring myself to keep doing so. Very annoying though as you can imagine. He was a lovely guy despite the indicator issues and that he kept talking about cheese - whether I liked strange cheeses, what was the oddest cheese I had ever eaten, have I ever eaten (insert unknown name here) Brazilian goat cheese etc. Very good English though. He was also determined to point out that "their" favelas have electricity, water and swerage unlike Rio.Belo Horizonte is very large - you only really see the expanse of it from the air. It's a massive sprawling place with lots of high-rise buildings, and quite a few pretty leafy squares that I saw as I zoomed past, but the people I met were all very happy and genuinely proud of their city. They didn't like Sao Paulo though - can't imagine why.I got onto the plane with my monopod this time without any problems. I went straight to the FIFA priority lane at security which I think is a wise thing to do. My new checkin technique is to go to the ticket sales desk and appear confused about which plane I was to catch. These desks are always quite high up so the person behind has no way of seeing the 20kg carry on case. Inevitably they are very helpful, and tell me which flight I have, what the gate is, and also check me in. This avoids any issues at the auto-checkin which had airline people monitoring it this morning.A rather haphazard takeoff followed with quite a lot of jerky rudder action from the man up front - he must have been playing with his joystick, and before we knew it we had landed at the wrong airport in Rio. I left Rio from the little Santos Dumont airport and returned to the big international airport. This meant a more expensive taxi to the Maracana stadium - I'm spending too much on taxis at the moment and need to reign in a bit, which should be easier now I'm not flying about any more.Of course, being match day the whole area around the stadium is closed off, so my taxi couldn't get close. I knew this would happen, and the plan was to have got a media bus from a hotel near the Santos Dumont airport which would go straight through the roadblocks like a hot knife through butter. As it was, my taxi dropped me off at the Maracana metro station which meant a long, hot walk dragging my leaden Peli case along closed roads, with my media credentials being examined every few yards by diligent but very friendly police types. In the taxi from the airport I'd unzipped my trouser legs to make them into shorts (see Mrs T, I told you that would come in handy!) and was sockless, so at least the walk was a bit more bearable.I hadn't booked a slot for the Ecuador v France game, but if there is space you can go on a waiting list. Once all the photographers who have booked have picked their slots, the waiting list people can go up. Unsurprisingly there were quite a few slots available, and I chose to go up in the "tribune" which is the large area in the stands where the writers and tv commentators sit. After hanging around and having a chicken-and-rice based lunch with lettuce, carrots and some other stuff (note Mrs T again) I got my slot from the nice people who run the allocation process. I then had to write my caption for the game and type in the squad list into my automatic type replace thingy (to save typing out the whole name of a player, I just type fr10 which puts "Karim Benzema of France" into the caption nice & quickly.At the front of the tribune area is a row of seats reserved for photographers. Unfortunately the glass panel in front is too high to allow us to shoot when sitting on the seats so various contorted stress positions are adopted as it's a bit socially awkward to stand and block the view of the journos in the row of seats behind. I compromised and sat on my upended Peli case which gave me enough of a rise to be able to shoot over the glass but not obstruct the guys behind me too badly. I set up my usual little TP-Link wireless router plugged into the LAN cable for my seat, and I was all set.Shooting from the tribune is quite pleasant. You get an overview of the whole game so can work out what is going on (very different from being at pitch level) and there's much less frantic camera swapping - in fact I shot everything apart from a couple of team lineups on my 400mm. Also, you get nice clean backgrounds as you're looking down on the pitch, so the players are just surrounded by green grass. This is quite a good thing sometimes as you'll have seen in the papers. You can also get a better representation of where the players are positioned if there is a goal, which of course there wasn't. Two 0-0 draws in two days. I'm cursed.You can see the match pictures here on the Focus Images site.I shot the game pretty much all in manual mode as the light was consistent once the sun had gone down. As it was setting, I got a nice GV of the stadium with some pleasing blueness to it all as you see at the to pof the post. This is one of the other reasons I went up into the tribune as my earlier GVs from a few days back weren't much cop - much better with players on the pitch and a full-ish 75,000 crowd. While the players were warming up there were some pleasing splodges of sunlight which I did my best to exploit on the rare occasion that someone would wander into one of them.It was quite a relaxing game to shoot which was very nice for a change. I was doing my own editing so using gaps in the play to get some early pictures out as fast as possible. I didn't miss too much other than a red card for one of the Ecuador players which I hadn't even realised had happened until after the game. There were quite a lot of attempts on target, and some good end-to-end stuff which made it a decently exciting affair. It needed a goal though, and it didn't get one.With a 0-0 score Equador were out and France were through (with Switzerland). The Equador fans managed to leave the stadium without incident unlike the English lot yesterday, and the whole thing was very good natured.I finished my edit while in the tribune, then wandered back to the media centre to find an Ecuadorian to help me caption one specific picture. And now I'm sitting on the media bus once again heading back to my apartment where I'll have a nice shower and then get something to eat and possibly a beer. Tomorrow is a busy admin day, Friday is a rest day, and then it's Uruguay v Colombia in the Maracana again. Will Suarez be there? I doubt it somehow.