You might be forgiven for thinking that all I do is take American Football shots. It’s just that the last few free weekends I’ve managed to get to some matches.

This isn’t the case, last weekend I took 4,500 photos at the Royal International Airshow Tattoo down in Fairford; more of that to follow.

Meanwhile, here’s some photos more in the reportage style. A few weeks ago I received a telephone call around midnight from the local police. They’d found my beloved old Ford Fiesta just up the road from us. Some youths had stolen it from the front of our house, driven it no more than a third of a mile & burned it out at the side of the road.

These are photos I’d much rather never have taken.

When I got there the fire brigade were still putting it out. I spoke to the police officer who was there who took some details & while we waited for the garage I popped home to grab the camera & flashgun.

I got the car from my father-in-law when he decided he was too old to drive. We ran it for a few years & it was just waiting for my daughter to pass her test so she could be the third generation in the family to take it on.

She passed her test the week after the car fire. We got £300 from the insurance.

I went back to Watford on the 28th June to shoot the Cheetah’s penultimate home match. It was against the MK City Pathfinders, whose match I’d shot the week before in Milton Keynes.

Most shots were taken on the 5D MkII with 600mm F4 or the 20D with 100-400mm. I wanted to try a technique I’ve used at music festivals for crowd shots. This involves sticking the camera on the monopod with a wide angle lens, using a radio trigger to fire it & hoisting it up above my head so it looks down on the subjects. It can be a bit hit & miss as you have to guess where the lens is pointing, but it can come up with some useful & unusual angle shots. (the middle shot below was not using this technique!)

As usual, I like to take shots which don’t include all the action & aren’t necessarily the standard ‘sports’ shots.

I have around 370 shots from the game at my old website, follow the links to Photo Galleries / Sport / US Football 5 for a look.