Cambridge Rugby (Campkins Workshop)
29th March, Cambridge University Rugby Football Club, Cambridge
This Rugby Workshop was organised by Campkins cameras. They had enlisted the help of Ben, the professional photographer from Cambridge United FC, who was there to offer guidance on cameras and settings and shutter speed, et cetera. He was clearly confused by the shape of the ball when it came to what was going on, however. The match itself was an old boys match between a couple of of the public schools in Cambridge and it was in aid of the charitable foundation for Tommy Man, who was the chairman of Cambridge University Rugby football club who passed at a young age some four or five years ago. The guest of honour on speaker at the dinner for the fundraiser with Johnny Wilkinson.
We arrived about 3 pm parking on one of the local roadside, I was lucky to find this space, and proceeded to walk to the ground. The match itself started at 4 pm. There were approximately 20 photographers there in total. I was accompanied by my friends from the Stevenage photographic club, Geraint Williams, Keith Bringlow, and Bob Gringham. We were able to move around the touch line and behind the dead ball area behind the posts. It did seem the action was always the other end of the pitch regardless of where I positioned myself.
The weather forecast was for bright clear and sunny afternoon. This lasted until approximately 4:15 and then clouded over the wind got up and it turned out to be quite chilly. This also meant that to keep the shutter speeds high enough to freeze the action I was having to raise the ISO to 1600 or 2000. The pictures have cleaned up using the denoise tool in Lightroom quite nicely. I did shoot the action quite wide using my XF 200 mm with the 1.4 tele converter, and I then had to crop in substantially to get the composition and to focusing on the action.
Although the colours are quite bright on the day I chose to process the colours using Fuji films Classic Chrome film simulation as the starting point I think this is given quite a nice feel to the photographs.
The best part of the day was that on leaving I met Johny Wilkinson in the car park and had a brief chat with him.
