After the great excitement of covering an international football friendly on Wednesday I then had to go and cover hockey and basketball games. It was a little of a shock to go from an evening with 50,000 spectators to the reality of these other sports.
Thursday night I was at Hovet covering a match between AIK and Timrå IK. Generally hockey is incredibly popular in Sweden, but right now in Stockholm attendance to matches is rather miserable. Around 3,000 people attended the match that night evening, which meant many open seats throughout the venue and a low key atmosphere.
On Friday I was photographing basketball, a sport which is not at all popular in Sweden. However it’s a sport I rather enjoy photographing. It was the first basketball game I’ve photographed this season and also my first time shooting basketball with my 1D X which I purchased in the summer. Using the new camera was a real pleasure. The images from the 1DX have significantly less noise that those from my older Mark IV. This is of course very much welcomed considering the lighting conditions of most basketball courts in Stockholm.
This coming week is pretty exciting. I will be covering a basketball game on Tuesday, on Wednesday shooting portraits of a basketball team, and then on Thursday I’m covering the Europa League match between AIK and Napoli. I’ve been especially looking forward to that one. I follow Serie A regularly, where as other sports I might follow strictly for the sake of professionalism and being informed. When AIK qualified for Europa League I followed the draw in hopes that an Italian team would come to Stockholm. So when they drew Napoli I was quite happy. Hopefully Cavani and Hamsik will play and I can bag some good shoots of them. The match between AIK and Napoli is also going to be the final game played at Råsunda Stadium, which is scheduled to be torn down just two days later. Which makes the evening even more interesting.
As always you can find these images and more via Pic Agency.