Boxing and the beautiful game

Thursday saw me traveling to North West of England - Hyde and Rochdale.

First in the program was a weigh-in for the EBU boxing title-fight at Hatton House in Hyde. I've been photographing a Finnish boxer Amin Asikainen for a while now, and by a lucky strike his fight now is in Manchester - which nice for me after moving back here from Finland.

As well as the promoter P3 Boxing - the images went to a Finnish MTV3's website - link to the weigh-in photos : http://www.mtv3.fi/urheilu/muutlajit/uutiset.shtml/arkistot/muutlajit/2009/09/961133?nyrkkeily

Good fun to see the Team Asikainen once again - had a nice chat with the manager, Amin and Amin's dad - amongst others.

The big fight in on tomorrow evening at the Manchester Velodrome... look out for the photos!
The days second trip was to the Spotland Stadium (Spotland..funny old name for a football ground.) to photograph the emerging talents on the Women's football.

Final qualifier for U19's EURO 2010 in Macedonia - game that was to decide the group winner between England and Norway.

Photos from this one can be seen at : http://googabuphotos.zenfolio.com/englandvsnorge09

Norway had the slight edge going into the game, thanks to their 12-0 trashing of previous opponents. So a draw was good enough for them - England on the other hand are the reigning U19 European Champs, so they were confident of a result in the game.

The first half saw England dominate the game and scoring a goal - but the Norwegians took the game to the English in the second half and deserved their equalising goal.

For photographing conditions - both events were pretty good. Hatton House had good lights and wasn't needed to crank up the ISO too much. Also there was pretty free movement to get the shots needed, so a big thanks to the Hatton Promotions for making it easy !

Rochdale stadium was a pleasure to work with - compared to the darkness I usually encounter at Worcester. ISO 2500 was OK to keep me going through the game, could've upped it to 3200 by the end. But decided not to - Norwegian celebrations were nicely right in front of me,so good set of images from that one off to the clients!

Back problems are still there - taking things very easy and being careful with it. Still very stiff and not able to do lifting or bending down normally. But with photo-work this won't effect me so much - most of the time you get to sit pretty comfortably anyways :-)