Auld Reekie Roller Girls

Last week I checked in to Facebook as you do and I was greeted by the words, "you have been mentioned..."  Anyway, I'm not one to be put off and I clicked on the mention to see a friend had mentioned me to someone from the Auld Reekie Roller Girls.

The Auld Reekie Roller Girls has three local teams ( The Cherry Bombers, Leithal Weapons and The Skatefast Club) and two teams (The Twisted thistles and Canon Belles) who compete around the UK.

So anyway, The mention relates to the bout that occurred yesterday and my friend was supposed to be going along to take photos.  She had a better offer of a trip to Cannes and Monaco.  I offered to go along and take some photos and they agreed.

Saturday came along and I decided to go in light.  Camera, speedlite and 24-105mm L series lens should do it (I did think at one point that maybe my 50mm prime lens with polarising lens may have been some use).   I arrived at 1pm and was shown in to find a few other people with cameras there, everyone has different setups and then i noticed  the light.

This (failed) photo without flash shows the ambient light in the arena and I was slightly concerned as there is very little I could do with this light.  The only thing I could do was put the trusty speedlite (ex430 II) and give it a go.

After taking the above photo I relaxed a little as I knew I could get a fairly decent shot and I experimented through the warm up.

A couple of minutes before the first half I took a gamble and went to the "safe" zone in the centre of the rink and I stayed there for the majority of the first half getting some good photos including this one of the Skatefast Club's jammers during the intro.

Once the bout got under way I got to grips with shooting a fast moving sport with very fast moving and close referees.  Several times one of them nearly took me out.  Still you need to take risks to get decent photo (so I've been told).

Anybody expecting Whip-It style slams would have been disappointed, but the pace and skill shown by the ladies was excellent and challenged me to catch action that looked real.

As the half wore on I decided to make a break for the outside of the rink (during a time out).  Here I found the opportunity for shots to be greater.

As you can see the above photo is black and white and there is a very good reason for this.  Firstly, my flash was not recycling as fast as it should (take spare batteries!) and this shot resulted in a photo with varying shades of orange as the colour.  The only thing for it was to open up lightroom 4 and see what I could do.  After lots of slider sliding I decided that a black and white image would be the best way to present the action in this shot.

The afternoon wore on and I racked up a pretty impressive 324 photos, excluding the ones I  tried out first and deleted.  I managed to catch some good action shots including the one above.

At roughly 4pm the bout finished and the victors were the Skatefast Club (in yellow), whilst the Cherry Bombers (in Red) were very valiant losers.  To be honest I lost track of the scoring but I was busy shooting and enjoying the spectacle.

Last night was spent editing the photos and I am glad to say that I actually got far more hits than misses in what I shot.

If you are in Edinburgh I would recommend a nice inexpensive way to spend a saturday afternoon is with the Auld Reekie Roller Girls.