I took my camera to Leederville Oval for the WAFL round eight East Perth–Subiaco game. Just a bit of an experiment with my Olympus OMD that is, in my unskilled hands at least, a but clunky for live sport action.
There were issues
1. Not for the first time. There was no card in the camera. No problem. At half time I wandered over to a nearby camera shop.
2. Impenetrable packaging. I spent most of the third quarter trying to get at the SD card. Bending, scratching, poking to no avail until to saw a slither of broken glass at my feet. It had a sharp edge that sliced through the softer part of the plastic packaging. The card was inserted into the camera as the three-quarter-time siren sounded.
I decided to take up position in the south-east pocket for the last quarter. I anticipated a surge by the Royals in last quarter and picked an into-the-sun spot as a challenge – but that wasn’t the third issue.
3. In a tangle. The camera strap was entwined with the handle of a bag inside my backpack. It seemed I’d spend the last quarter with another near impossible task. Then I noticed an East Perth player – it might have been Tom Medhat – was having shot from the opposite pocket. Ignoring the bag hanging from the camera strap, I set up. The ball floated across the goals and Tom Graham marked strongly just metres away. “I think I got it!” I thought. First snap of the day.
Later I missed youngster Darcy Craven kicking a classy snapped goal, was a fraction late when he took a contested mark near the point post and completely missed his mark-of-day just before the siren. A few days later he was picked up by Brisbane in the mid-season draft. Pity, it would have been nice to have decent photo of him.
australianrules.com.au 