Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage

Sunday afternoon was spent in the freezing cold standing on a rugby pitch in Terenure College RFC watching Lansdowne and Terenure play what turned out to be a one-sided affair.  I was there to watch my brother-in-law Darragh, who plays in the centre with Lansdowne.  The match was cut short after one of the Lansdowne players broke his leg in two places with about 20 minutes to go, and by then my fingers were too numb for any more photography.

One of the benefits of going to a match like this, as a photographer, is the ease of access you get for some good action shots of the game.  There was no barrier between me and the pitch, and very few people watching the game, so as line outs, scrums and penalties were taken I could align myself to the action along the sideline and get a good angle for photographs.

I always think rugby photographs are enhanced by mud – the muddier the players the better for conveying the intensity of the game – and the pitch at Terenure (not the main pitch) didn’t disappoint in that respect.  Getting the exposure just right to show enough detail in the mud while still holding detail in the sky required a bit of post-processing effort, but nothing that the 12-bit RAW file that my D700 produced couldn’t handle.

The one thing that this photo is lacking, sadly, and which I feel a good rugby photo should have, is a view of the ball.  It’s still in the scrumhalf’s hands and the next frame I have is after the put-in, where it is already on its way to the back of the scrum, but obscured by the Terenure players’ legs.  Next time I photograph a scrum I will hold fire on the shutter until the ball is visible.  I didn’t think (for a split second) about photoshopping one in there, but that’d be too much work and I’d still know it wasn’t really there.

I still like the photo for its portrayal of the physicality of the scrum in rugby.  More than that though, the mud, the cold and the colour of the team jerseys brought back vivid memories of my very very short lived rugby playing days at Christian Brothers College in Cork, where our school jerseys were red, yellow and black and our main rivals (Presentation Brothers College aka Pres) work purple, black and white.