So, after the early morning and a hot bath and some shopping and a bit of sleep, we headed out to a football match. I’d received a challenge from Jenny’s Chris (actually I daresay he’s Chris’s Chris, but you know what I mean) to visit a football match. Despite the fact he still hasn’t watched Eraserhead, the only challenge I have set him, I decided to go ahead with this, the approximately 5 millionth challenge of his that I have achieved.

The match was Loughborough Dynamo vs. Stratford Town. What a great thing to do! We stood in Chris’s recommended location right by the dugouts so you can hear what the managers are shouting, and boy did they say some rude swears. The match was exciting and enthralling, with five goals (three to them unfortunately). Cup of hot chocolate in the clubhouse during half time to thaw out. You know what, I think I might even do it again some time.

I took the camera and discovered it to be rather harder than I thought to take photos of such a quick-paced sport. The low light of the miserable weather didn’t help because I was compromising between graininess and blur the whole time. But I’ve made a small gallery of some of the shots, and a couple appear below:

Click for gallery and full size pics

Click for gallery and full size pics

It took me a while to realise that shooting from the side of the pitch put a yellow stripe through everyone (the fence on the opposite side of the pitch), so after a while I tried a few shots from the grass bank behind me. This resulted in much cleaner backgrounds, as you can tell from the second shot above.