Blackcats Forever

In all my years of photography, I have spent relatively little time shooting sport and yet it is a skill worth acquiring. We see men and women struggling with themselves, with their opponents and with the prevailing elements. It is invariably a time of high drama and an opportunity for impactful people pictures.

This afternoon a NSW Group 10 Rugby League match was in progress down at the Blackheath Sports Ground. It was the Blackheath "Blackcats" versus the Bathurst "Panthers". There does seem to be this infatuation with dark felines in the matter of team names and uniforms but after a while the teams became easily distinguished. Blackheath are doing very well in the competition this year and while I was at the ground (ahem) "we" ran in three tries. Conversions seemed hard to come by however and so the score was still only 12 nil, not long before half time, when I had to go.

I mounted my 120-400mm zoom on my new lightweight personal DSLR, set the kit onto a monopod and started shooting. It takes a while to get used to the unpredictable motion in a League game but after a while I found myself scoring a higher rate of "keepers". I found that many of my pictures were missing the ball, which tended to rob them of a compositional focus. I had managed to get a few pictures with the ball in shot, however - albeit not as many as I'd have liked.

In the end, I went for this "kicking for touch" picture as my blip. Even though the ball has just left the frame, the concentrated anxious gaze of the players seems to put the ball back into the composition. We can all guess where it probably is. I am determined to get some more practice soon.