SDFL and Sportiva Events Devon Grit. All photographs © Al Macphee/MiraclePR
Friday 27th August 2021 – The TCS South Devon League Charity Shield
Friday was spent preparing for the Torbay Clearance Services South Devon Football League Charity Shield. This is the traditional curtain raiser to the league season and the sponsors were going to present the shield to the winning side. This year, it was an all South Hams affair with East Allington United playing Meadowbrook Athletic at Totnes and Dartington FC’s Foxhole Ground.
This was a standard cup final with referee and linesman shots before the match, action pictures during it and presentation shots afterwards. It was pitch black while we were doing the presentations because the game went to penalties so that’s when you have to really know your equipment and be able to take pictures blindfolded. For those who are interested, East Allington won with the goalkeeper scoring and saving a penalty!
Saturday 28th & Sunday 29th August 2021 – Getting Ready for the Grit
Saturday was a day of filing, liaising with Neil, the SDFL press officer, and responding to messages from people asking if I was going to put the pictures online, etc. I was also preparing for Sunday, the Sportiva Events Devon Grit, a series of bike rides over gravel trails around Woodbury Common.
The Sportiva Events Devon Grit consists of four sections ranging from 36km to 100km in length (which will increase to five in 2022 with the addition of a 22km ‘Micro’ section). Competitors can download pictures of themselves for free from the Sportiva Events Facebook page so essentially the organiser need a shot of every entrant. To meet the brief, I have to do some map reading on arrival to work out where I can go so that every competitor from every section of the entry list will pass me.
Even then, it’s still not easy because you’ve got to keep an eye on who’s passing and know when everyone’s gone. And there were around 360 riders this year!
I cheated this time and I asked the organiser for his suggestion because he rides the route as they’re putting flags and directional markers out (although this time there were no directional markers so the competitors had to rely on their SatNavs and Garmins, etc!)
So, the organiser found me a spot and gave me the What3Words ‘words’. The car park was just seconds off the main road and a five minute walk to my spot which was handy. I parked up, took my seat because you don’t know how long you’re going to be waiting and shot every rider as they came past.
Once everyone had gone, it was a mad dash back to the finish line to try and catch as many people coming through the finish line as possible.
Once everyone had gone, it was a mad dash back to the finish line to try and catch as many people coming through the finish line as possible. This gives them a second option for a picture. As I got there, five or six people had already come through the finish line so that was a matter of quickly setting up those guys, posing them with nice smiles on their faces, and then going up to a spot where I could see them approaching and shoot them as they came past.
In events like this, you haven’t got time to move around. You haven’t even got time to go for a coffee. You’ve got your flask; you’ve got your fruit. You sit there and wait because if you miss a competitor, you’re going to upset that entry and that’s not good for the company. You’re paid to do a job so you sit down, wait and record everyone as they come past (including all the thumbs up and other antics).
After about half past three, when we were sure that everyone was past the checkpoint, the organiser asked me if I wanted a coffee. I told him I would have one when I’d finished. That led us on to discuss a finishing time because five competitors had found a nice pub and decided to stop there. So we both agreed a cut off time of four o’clock. If they’re not through by then they would miss out on a finishing line shot. Sorry guys but the company’s not going to want to pay me a fortune to sit for three hours and wait for you to wander out of the pub. I waited with a coffee until about four thirty while my phone was charging (from the back up phone charger battery pack in the car – another important item of kit!).
After getting back home, the priority was a proper cup of tea and something decent to eat. As the kettle’s boiling, I’m putting on the computer to back up the memory card. Then I have to edit the shots.
Now, if you’ve followed my advice in How To Photograph Sports and got most of your pictures right in camera, then you shouldn’t have too many images to bin. You should be able to just shrink them down, put the logo on and then upload them to Facebook. The batch processing takes a while so I let that run overnight.
Monday 30th August 2021 – Facebook and fine tuning the Sportiva Events photo gallery
Following a couple of cups of coffee for focus, it’s into Facebook with my checklist and captions and creating the Facebook albums . That’s more or less it for the weekend although I am currently working with software developers to create an automated tagging system to help competitors more easily locate their pictures rather than having to look through the albums. I’ll be going into that in more detail in a later post.
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