Sport Pictures

The wheels of opportunity and circumstance were turning in my favor this last Sunday. My first ever confirmed press pass was for a Beach Volleyball competition in Lausanne, Switzerland around 2005, but alas the fact I only found out about this two days before the tournament, I was actually unable to fund the flight to get out to Switzerland on that occasion.

Now in the UK Beach Volleyball tournament only ever happen on the South Coast in places like Brighton and when you live in Manchester its far enough away to think twice about the journey. So it was to my great surprise that I found out that there was going to be a tournament in Blackpool of all places in early September.

Confirmation that I’d be able to shoot for womensportreport.com only really happened on the Saturday evening prior to the final day of finals.

So I packed up all my gear and made sure that the correct lenses would be on the two D200s as I’d already worked out that changing lenses on sand was not really an option. So I jumped in my little smart car and made the 55 mile journey to Blackpool.

The day started brilliantly with lovely bright sunlight through hazy broken clouds. Regardless of the fact the clouds became thicker during the day and turned into a rather dull day by the end of the day, but for a week when the weather has been really poor for a total week it was great that the good weather came out at a weekend for a change. Women Sport Report used a few of the pictures which I was able to wire straight from the media tent on the afternoon. There report can be found here.

This picture is the one of the ’standard’ shots from Beach Volleyball that has intrigued me since I started photographing sports all that time ago.

Over the past three or so years I have been blessed with being able to shoot at a number of local, national and international sporting events. Earlier today as I was watching Gail Emms and Nathan Robinson in their badminton games I realised that I must have shot a number of Olympic competitors.

My challenge to you is to spot the Olympic athletes in my photographs on Flickr. For the person that tags the most Olympic athletes before the closing ceremony I will provide a professionally printed A3 photograph of the image of their choice from my Flickr collection. 

For a valid claim you have to tag the most Olympic athletes from my collection with the Flickr +note function with Athletes Name and ‘Olympics 2008′ in the note [ click on the photograph of Fatima Moreira de Melo above to see an example]. Please then add a comment in the comments section stating your claim with the Sports Persons name. The person with the most ‘claims’ in the notes/comments will be sent an email and asked to provide details of the image they would like and an address to send it.

All entries after the closing ceremony will not be counted.  Get spotting those Olympic athletes, the fun thing is I don’t actually know how many I have got!