Sport through the lens

End of October and whole November are months, when hell breaks loose. Literally. All sorts of leagues starts, skiing season starts and summer holidays are finally over. I was writing about Alpine skiing World cup start already, and now I will try to post few photos from other sports, we covered in last month or so.

On middle of October, basketball Euroleague traditionally starts. This year Union Olimpija was playing their first match abroad, so for me Euroleague started on 30th of October with Olimpija’s first home match. I’m not going to write about background stories around accreditation process, so all I will say is that some people should get their priorities straighten. Obviously covering matches for agencies which all together cover market of over 200 million citizens, is not enough to get accreditation without arguing. On the other side, you can see people with accreditations who never published their photos anywhere else then on their own blog… go figure.

Anyway… things were solved before it was too late, and everything worked fine on the end. This year’s Euroleague has some changes, and in first part, there’s going to be only 5 home matches, stretching from 30th of October 2008 to 6th of January 2009. With current form of Olimpija, I doubt there will be any other Euroleague matches in this season, so more or less my basketball season will be over around New Year.

And to be honest, I won’t really miss it for rest of season. Working conditions are worse and worse every year. There’s less and less space to work from, and I would actually understand this, if there would be some need to put more some extra spectator chairs in arena. But in reality, arena is far from sold out, and a lot of sideline seats are empty, so there’s really not much use for shrinking even those 2 meters of space we normally had on endlines. But that’s current policy and we all have to deal with it. They say it’s going to be better next year, when only team’s official photographer will be allowed to shoot matches :) Yeah I would love to see Reuters, AFP, AP and similar agencies not having coverage of these games. ;)

Next to basketball, October is also start of Austrian ErsteBank Ice hockey League (EBEL). It’s not all that interesting for me, but considering there’s few players from countries where we sell photos, we get to shoot some of matches. Shooting ice hockey is not as much of fun as actually playing it, but it’s still nice sport to shoot. It’s not easy, sometimes it can be even dangerous, but it’s nice sport with lots of action.

Normally light is not all that great, especially considering fast action, but white ice adds some extra, and it’s not all that hard to deal with it. Problem with Slovenian ice arenas is their age. This means lamps are from all over the world, and so is their temperature. So setting white balance for on part of ice rink is one thing, while color temperature 10 meters away is completely different story. But it’s same for everyone so we handle it somehow. :)

Other then that, there’s nothing much to complain. Except that we could get some more money from this. :) There is another problem with ice hockey, but unless we would be allowed to skate around, there’s no other chance. In ice hockey there’s not many positions from where we could shoot. So most of photos are pretty standard ones, without even having option for something different. But when puck flies with more then 100km/h, you don’t really want to risk getting it in your forehead :)

November is traditionally also month when few competitions finish. Formula 1 is one of them, and these year we were getting and then reselling feed from F1 races. Unfortunately it didn’t go all too well, but at least there was something. So we will see about next year.

Next one is sport climbing World Cup. As for quite few years till now, Kranj and artificial wall in Kranj is last stop of season for World’s best sport climbers. This year I was covering just men and women finals, so it was only about 2 hours of work. Covering World cup finals have same problem as shooting ice hockey. There’s not much options to do something different.

So when I’m looking back to my previous years photos, it’s pretty hard to tell from which year they are. Even most of athletes are same. But it’s still interesting sport. And watching these people hand on their finger nails is really impressive. Not to mention organization and head of this race, Tomo Cesen himself. Comparing attitude of these people with previously mentioned basketball is impossible. I’m perfectly aware that stills don’t directly bring money, at least not the way selling TV rights does. But it really doesn’t take much to have friendly atmosphere. And Tomo and his team do great job with this.

This is one of things which makes shooting climbing much nicer on the end, people report from such events in much nicer way, then from those, where already on beginning they made us pissed. Sure with photos it’s different. We take photos one way or the other, but writing press can actually made their own statements. And after that they all wonder why they were presented so bad way. Well… come and learn how things should be done. And climbing World Cup in Kranj is one of places, where quite many organizers could learn from.

So to be honest, covering climbing in Kranj is one of more pleasant assignments I do through the year.

And for the end, there’s another sport which just started, and we will see how long this year their path through Champions league will be. It’s handball. RK Krim is playing in women Champions leage, and for this season, they moved back to their old location in Kodeljevo arena, Ljubljana. Last two years, they were playing in Tivoli Arena, and it was much more pleasant to work in Tivoli. Light is better, parking is better, but atmosphere is probably better in smaller Kodeljevo arena.

Last year Krim’s season in European cups didn’t last long, but it looks better this year, so it might be, I will be shooting handball a bit more this year, then I did last year. What else to say about it? It’s game, which is quite fast, even though women handball is fairly slow compared to men, and therefore much easier to shoot. With lots of body contact, it normally offers good opportunities for photos, and it’s pretty hard to come back from match without decent action photos.

So what else was new? I guess that was enough for one month :) But if you don’t have enough, you can see more of our photos in PhotoSI on-line archive.