Rugby tournament

Last weekend I was invited to shoot a friend playing rugby at a friendly tournament in town. I used this opportunity to take a loaned 100-400mm lens out and test how good the auto-focus is.

I have seen photos of rugby from South Africa where the players have their fingers in the opposing players mouths so I was really hoping to catch some good action. I was not disappointed. The faces they give as they run, or anticipate getting tackled are fantastic.

No one takes this tournament seriously and the team names showed that to be apparent. This young man was sporting a fresh "mullet" playing for the Communists. Up next was a girls game where the "Sperm Gurglers" were against the "Camel Toes".

The girls are known to dress up in crazy outfits for the tournaments too, and so we had neon green g-strings outside of silver leggings and all the hues of pink known to man. This huddle was too much of a photo opportunity to miss.

As for the camera and lens? Well, the camera did exactly what I thought it would do. Shoot fast, miss a few but hit most. I was able to capture peak action with a lens that opened up to only 5.6 under bright conditions.

As soon as I have five grand, I'll be buying a 300mm F 2.8 and then we will see how fast this camera can perform.

Fun with filters

A fun way to play with your photos is to make them look like they were shot with a tilt-shift lens. Instead of buying a $2000 lens, you can use photoshop instead. The resulting image looking as though it were a toy model set. (click on the image to see it larger)

I won't go into a step-by-step here, but check out this link: http://www.recedinghairline.co.uk/tutorials/fakemodel/

His tutorial is dead simple and it's a fun trick to play with.

A trip home

In November of 2009, I was able to get back to England for a trip home. Although I was born in Toronto, we moved to England when I was six months old and stayed there till I was five when my parents split and we moved back to Canada. My first memories are of England, and after we moved to Canada we returned annually for many years to visit all our family whenever we could.

My hometown is called Clevedon, in North Somerset in the South of England. It's a small seaside town that looks across the muddy waters of the Bristol Channel to Wales. When I knew that I was moving to Canada, I used to look at those lights and ask my mum if that was Canada. It didn't seem so bad knowing that I wasn't moving too far.

Clevedon has a pier that is the focal point for the town. In 1970 it fell down as a result of a load test, and was reconstructed in 1998. My father's name is somewhere on that long wooden walkway.

The "beach" that I remember playing on is a small patch of stones and the rest of the seaside is covered in smelly seaweed and rough rocks. The memories of childhood are totally different than reality.

The high street is called Hill Road where my mum grew up living on top of a grocery store owned by my granddad. I used to buy all my Mr. Men books from a stationary store on Hill Rd. that is still in business today. My mum's store has been renamed and is now a beauticians. But the Cambourne name is still well known in the town.

The Curzon theatre is the oldest continually running movie house in the world. If you look at the photo carefully, you can see holes in the facade from a bomb that landed during WWII. I remember the intermission during a movie where all the kids would run down to the ice cream man to get an "ice lolly". Sounds a bit "ginger beer" now.

Last place to visit is Christ church where I was baptized. It's one of those structures that I remember vividly from my childhood and it sits near a bowling green.