Tag Archives: northamptonshire

Been a while…

Posted on by
Been a while since I posted – mainly explained because I haven’t taken any photos…
Anyway, I recently invested in a 10-stop ND filter – it only lets through 1/1000th of the light, so a 1/30sec exposure becomes 30secs, making it easy to get long exposures in broad daylight.
I spent Monday morning wandering along the Grand Union Canal just outside Northampton. Took me ages to find it, as the roads bear no relation to what they were when I last went (probably about 25 years ago), and it’s mainly a big set of distribution centres. It’s one of the places I can genuinely look at and say “I can remember when all this was fields”.
A 15 second exposure

30 seconds – really annoyed by the smudge top-centre. I cleaned the sensor before the rugby on Sunday and still ended up with it. Really annoying.
As the canal passed under the M1, there was an interesting juxtaposition of the old canal and the stark modern bridge.

Getting all Historical

Posted on by
Thinking about published photos of mine, it reminded me of by far and away my most successful picture.

This is legendary Australian fast bowler Dennis Lillee being carried off the pitch in Northampton in 1988, after he’d slipped and knackered his ankle ligaments.

Basically, I scooped the world on this one. I was the only person on the ground with a camera on a fairly dull day in a match against Leicestershire.
I offered the photo to the resident journalist from the Chronicle and Echo, and they published it on the front page. It was also printed in Wisden and Cricketer magazines. I must have made all of £30-40 out of it. Mind you, to a student 22 years ago, that was a decent bit of cash!
And it’s in Lillee’s autobiography “Menace”.
When the book came out, I just happened to see it in Borders and had a flick through. And blimey, there was one of my photos! I rang up the publishers and explained that they were using a picture without permission from the copyright holder – they were fine, explained that the picture had been supplied by Lillee (he’d had copies of the print at the time) and asked me to send proof that the picture was mine. I sent them a copy of the Chron’s front page (which, of course, I’d kept) and they paid me for it – another £25 or so – and bunged in a copy of the paperback version of the book, complete with credit.
There’s big money in photography…