I was taken to the Oval a couple of weeks ago [very kindly at the expense of a vendor] for the England vs South Africa 4th test. I’ve always wondered what the chances were of being turned away at the turnstile of some event because I was carrying a bagful of equipment. I decided to take a chance this time as I hadn’t paid…

I spent pretty much the whole day shooting with my long L lens [100-400mm]. I find this quite a tough lens to use: obviously you are operating with a very narrow angle of view but – not wanting to sound like the lily-livered office dweller that I am – handheld it really starts to get heavy over a period of hours.

I tried to be systematic, despite a certain beer oriented clouding of judgement, and started to crack off a series of pictures framed on the batsman to co-incide with each bowling delivery. It has to be said that after about 60 repetitions, it starts to get fairly tedious. See earlier reference to beer.

Perseverence paid off – almost spectacularly, but not quite, with this shot:

This was, without doubt, the most exciting single picture that I’ve ever taken. I have a mate [who very kindly me leant me his Nikon D300 a few weeks ago – fantastic machine, enough to make me want to abandon the Canon ship on the spot] who likened taking a photo to a golf shot. I like the analogy a lot: the convergence of propicious circumstance, the satisfaction of connecting with the sweetspot… I just really, really wish that I’d cranked up the ISO to 400, which I did later in the day. This is almost fast enough: if you look closely between the ‘e’ and the ‘s’ in the lettering of the advertising hoarding, you can just see the bails flying. Bringing it up to 1/500 second that I was able to get later in the day would have just sharpened it up.

Frustratingly, this is the only time I’ve managed to have a backup disaster and delete the original data. For those who are interestied I shot this at 1/200, F5.6, and on aperture priority at 400mm.

A work colleague made a very interesting comparison with a shot that appeared on the Beeb website [picture 8]. There was a group of professional photographers sitting on the boundary about 20-30 yards to our left, one of whom must have caught this. Interesting to note the difference in talent, kit, and technique 😉