Shades of 2001

“Once again our second half defence was absolutely outstanding” ~ Daniel Anderson

It was a game that had the feel of a Grand Final, loser gets sent packing, and winner takes all.  It wasn’t, but for

the players and the 74549 fans, there couldn’t have been a better game of footy.  Friday night was about Hayne, it was about El Masri, and it was about Sydney.  But throughout the course of the game, there was trouble for the stars. 

Patten taking an accidental knock to the head in the first play for the bulldogs.
Hayne on report for coming in with his knees when Goodwin scored the first try.

El Masri moving the fullback to accomodate the loss of Patten, and thus exposing the doggies right side defence to the brilliance of Inu and Burt.
Parra skipper Nathan Cayless limping down the tunnel with a hamstring injury

With all this going on, it’s easy to get sidetracked and lose your way in a game as important as this.  Fortunately for Parramatta, the supporting cast stepped up to keep the pressure on.  Eventually, after 70minutes of see-sawing scorelines, the tries came rolling in.


The win on Friday night was a credit to the underrated players of today’s game.  Starting with Ben Smith (left), was once a part of Parramatta’s backline.  After being sidelined with injury, is now in the 2nd row as a strong defender and reliable attacker.  Let’s not forget the awesome catch he made against the Titans to score a try.

Jeff Robson (middle), before last night, did you even know who he was?  Now you can refer to him as the “landscape gardener on minimum wage who got man of the match in possibly the biggest game Sydney has ever seen”  Sure he’s not the most exciting player, or even the most skilful.  But he brings solid defence, great organisational skills and a steady hand in possibly the most unpredictable team in the comp. 

Joel Reddy (right), always overshadowed by the great accomplishments of his father Rod Reddy.  When he’s not being compared to his dad, he’s being called mini-Hindmarsh (the resemblance is justified).  He is definitely the most underrated player in the team, he scores tries, saves tries, and even puts the Guru through a gap every now and then. 

We all love the stars of the game, but we can’t take these guys for granted.  The guys that throw “hand-grenades” before being held in a tackle, the guys that are always in support (ie the try by Daniel Mortimer), and the guys who spend half the match with their faces in the turf to keep the ball in possesion.  Grand Final is ours to win or lose, we’ve made history over the last 11 weeks, we just need to do it for another 80mins. 

At the end of the day, Jarryd Hayne’s Dally M medal, 7 game win streak, beating the Dragons, Titans and Bulldogs in succession … all this will have been for nothing if the Grand Final isn’t ours.  Nathan Hindmarsh knows what I’m on about “we’ve come from nowhere to being 8th and now in the grand final … but we haven’t won anything yet” ~ Hindy during the postgame conference.  Oh by the way, congratulations on 259 career games, tied in 1st with Ray Price. 

Maybe next Sunday can erase the bitter taste that I’ve had in my mouth since the 2001 grand finals. 

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The Impossible Dream

Not too long ago everybody wrote off the Parramatta Eels for this season. Inconsistent form, frustrating combinations, handling errors and a genuine lack of creativity from key playmakers turned what was supposed to be a promising season into a landslide.

Fast forward a month or two, the eels officially had no mathematical chance of making the finals. Nathan Hindmarsh once said on the footy show “we need to win 9 out of our next 8 to make the top 8”. The next night Parra played Melbourne in Hindy’s 250th career game for the eels, we won.

We also won the next 6 games, finishing off with a great game against the West Tigers. The city of Parramatta was buzzing, the papers couldn’t get enough of Jarryd Hayne, these 7 straight wins were a direct result of his brilliance. All of a sudden people were calling the Eels premiership contenders, they were talking about Hayne the way people talk about Kobe … “we know he’s going to get the ball, we can’t stop him, all we can do is try to limit his chances and make it harder for him”

The following week, Eels played the Dragons, who at the time were in a heated battle for 1st place alongside the Bulldogs. I remember saying “we’re going to beat the dragons, we’ve won 7 straight, they’ve lost 3 straight”. The scoreline … 37 – 0, Dragons win.

1st week of finals football, Parra played the Dragons (yes, again) 1st vs 8th, and after the 37-0 drubbing the previous week there were a lot of doubts over this game. In a remarkable display of hard-nosed defence and a bit of luck, Parra won the match by 15pts at Dragons home ground.

Parramatta fans flooded to Sydney Football Stadium the following friday to play the Gold Coast Titans in the quarter finals. The motto was to take it one game at a time, and the Titans were the 3rd seed with a great halfback-fullback combination in Scott Prince and Preston Campbell. But a spirited performance from the supporting cast such as Todd Lowry, Ben Smith and Jonathan Wright helped bring the Parramatta faithful to their feet.

Notable performances include:

- Nathan Hindmarsh (as always) : 49 tackles, 10 Hitups … and a fair few crucial tackles at that
- Jarryd Hayne (why is nobody surprised?) : 165 Run meters, 357 Kick meters, 17 Break tackles (17!)
- Fuifui Moimoi : Just because he’s FUUUUIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

"The confidence comes from just playing in tough matches week after week,”

"Realising we are good enough to withstand pressure and counter-punch.

That is what the confidence comes from."

With that being said, I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. But we are all witnesses, friday made the history books, Eels had never beaten Titans before (EVER). Time to make history again, win the premiership from the 8th position and get some redemption from that 2001 season.

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Good things come in 3’s

Product photography is something that I haven’t really done before, despite being still life there’s plenty of room for creativity.  You can play around with the lighting, the arrangement of the objects, the background/backdrop and even camera angles. 

I had 2 energy efficient light bulbs on left and right of the picture, softened with white semi-transparent sheets.  The background was created with a black piece fabric.  Photo taken with an EOS 500D and the standard EF-S 18-55mm IS lens as I didn’t have the 50D with me today.  Fortunately I did have access to these 3 lenses, which was what inspired me to attempt this shot. 



Starting from the left we have the EF 16-35mm f2.8L MKII.  Great lens, extremely wide on a full frame body, and the fast aperture makes it a great lens for both photojournalists and enthusiasts alike. 

In the middle is the oft forgotten EF 24-70mm f2.8L.  It’s a mystery to me why this lens doesn’t really come up in conversations.  Everybody talks about the 16-35, the 24-105, and the great canon primes, but this tends to be forgotten.  In the short amount of time that I had to play around with this lens, it’s a fantastic piece of glass, has rock solid build, and a monster of a hood.  Construction of its lens elements is quite unique, you can see in the image that the lens is at minimum length at 70mm, and the barrel extends as you zoom out … making this mechanism the opposite of all other canon lenses.  This also explains the ridiculously large lens hood, which I think looks great by the way.

Finally, on the right we have the popular EF 17-40 f4L.  Construction and build is very similar to the 16-35mm, and the only real difference between the 2 is that the 17-40 is smaller and has a slower aperture.  This is definitely a lens for the landscape shooter, extremely sharp, strong build, fairly versatile in terms of focal length as well.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the 16-35mm, but the 17-40 is about $1000 AUD cheaper while producing an image quality very similar to that of the 16-35. 

I strongly recommend the 24-70 for full frame users, but if you’re a full frame user you don’t need me to tell you that.  For the landscape enthusiast, go for the 16-35 if you can, but if you’re on a budget get the 17-40 and spend the rest of the money on filters :)

Surprisingly, product photography was quite enjoyable so I might have to look further into it.  Like I said in previous posts though, there’s plenty more to come.

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Too much IR

ohh kay, I admit I’ve been neglecting you guys for almost a month now.  I know you’ve heard it all before, but there’s good reason to that.  Rather than read about my bitching and complaining about my workload I thought I’d let a picture do the talking.  This is a photo blog after all.

 

 

Photo taken with the good old Panasonic Lumix LX-3
That’s a typical view of my work desk while I’m doing reports.  I don’t really know why I decided to take this photo actually.  But since the table has IR spectra all over it, I put an IR filter in photoshop to make it seem less ordinary. 

That’s it for now, don’t worry, I got some big things planned for the future. 
By the way … if anyone can confirm that the middle IR spectrum is for acetanilide, that would be a great help haha.

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