COP Events, Football, 1942

To close this series of press negatives off, below are all the images from events labeled 1942. The majority are from a football match.

There’s absolutely no other information available.

Shooting sports with a press camera is no mean feat. There is no time to focus, all shooting is done in predetermined focus zones and the action is typically tracked using a sports finder. This is a simple wire frame allowing for a rough order of magnitude framing of the image. Shutter speeds were slower than what we are used to right now.

In the end, one and other results often in blurry images, not perfectly in focus across the field. But the playing field was level for all photographers and it does take some practices and a few hundred sheets of film before one was proficient at it.

As far as I can tell based on negatives so far, this is Joel’s first serious attempt at event and sports photography at SJC/COP.

Quite a few military uniforms at this event, but we are at war. The impact of this for Joel will become clear over the next few blogposts.

There is a lone image of a 3 meter diving board jump with the diver neatly captured mid-air. Nice.

The rest are all football images. Joel does have a problem with light leaks in his film holder shooting outdoors in bright sunlight.

Joel did well, quite a few good action shots with players mid-air and there’s a ball in most of the shots. Of course, we don’t know how many shots he took and how many were rejected, but still. Great effort.

Over the next few months, Joel is forced to move in a different direction, a journey starting in the next blog post.

Cheers !