As well as heading into the outback (or at least the part of it that is in and around the Blue Mountains, outside of Sydney) at the weekend, I also got to experience another side of Aussie life – a game of “footie”. Saturday marked the first game of the AFL season for the Sydney Swans, who were playing St. Kilda. And I had a ticket.
The game was a home game for the Swans, and it was played in the ANZ stadium, which is the former Olympic Stadium. As a result it is easily accessed by good public transport links, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the ticket for entry also covered train transport to and from the stadium.
Because it was in a well-established stadium, there was an easily-found website that I could check regarding camera regulations, and I was able to confirm that I could bring a camera as long as it wasn’t for commercial use. So if you want to buy a print of this image, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Mind you, if you want to buy a print of this image and you’re not the guy in the foreground, I’d be asking some questions of you anyway!
Knowing that my D700 wouldn’t be a problem, I packed it along with a 24-70mm lens. I wanted to travel light so left it at that, but regretted not bringing the fisheye lens as soon as we entered the stadium, which is an impressive sight.
At 30 minutes a quarter, an AFL game has plenty of time for food, drink, toilet breaks, and in my case at least, photography, and later during the game I moved to the back of the stand for some wider angle shots. When editing the photos I took I was drawn to this one, where the shot is actually pretty good in terms of lighting straight out of the camera, and I just applied minimal tweaks.
You can see the original image straight from the camera below for the sake of comparison, and apart from a tweak of contrast, upping the recovery slider, and very slight adjustments to highlight and shadow recovery, all steps I tend to batch apply now to virtually any image I take, there is no other processing.
The light is nice in this because, much like my dusky Circular Quay shots, the sky and the floodlit stadium are nicely balanced, while the lighting on the main subject is nice because he is effectively softly lit by the floodlights which are numerous, and at many different angles, but with a hard edge to the light because each individual flood light is a small, far away (and therefore hard) light source.
It’s nice to get an image that you could use straight from the camera, and this one is, in my mind at least, one of those.
Bewty! we’ll be in Sydney in June, can’t wait. We’ve got tickets to two footy matches in Melbourne. I’m still contemplating what lenses to take. Gotta get lots of shots inside the MCG!