David Griffin Photography

Our nephew, Matt, who lives out in the Springfield area, plays soccer in a league that has games all over Massachusetts, so every once in a while they head out this way and we do our best to try to catch the game.

Yesterday they played in Hudson, at the Hudson Portuguese Club field that sits right next to the Assabet River.  I  had just spent six hours shooting a horse show in Littleton (the subject of a forthcoming blog post) and my back hadn’t fully absorbed the Advil I had taken 30 minutes ago — so I brought a small folding stool to sit on to watch the game.

That’s Matt on the right (#27) - he plays defense.

My brother Peter (Matt’s dad) had brought along his 5-year old son Nathan to the game as well (that’s him, below, after the game).  So I’m sitting with my little chair, a camera and monopod clicking away and Nathan winds his way between me and the camera to look through the viewfinder.   I lower the monopod so it is the proper height and soon he’s following the game through it.  I fire a couple of shots and he quickly learns where that button is.  (After a few presses I lower the frame rate from 13fps or he’ll burn through my card in 2 minutes.)

And so we begin this interesting relationship — Nathan is aiming and shooting — finding each player on his brother’s team, taking their photo and letting me know their names,  and I’m holding down the auto-focus button and occasionally guessing what the zoom should be based on the action in front of us, and noting the shots as they come up on the review screen.  (Nathan quickly learns which button displays the full image so he can see it.)

There’s a lot of crooked photos and less than inspiring action, but once in a while he nails one:

I manage to get control of the camera now and then, but most of the time he was shooting and asking what all the buttons and numbers meant.  (At one point I had to chide him that the shots remaining counter heading towards zero was NOT a goal.)

If you would like to see more photographs from the game, I’ve published a set on my Community Gallery (see (”Soccer Game - Hudson“) — admittedly there’s a dash of family photographs in there, but what the heck?

I won’t tell you which ones I took and which ones are Nathan’s.  The scary part is that for some of them, I honestly can’t be sure.  Good equipment?   Good coaching?  Or did I have my replacement sitting on me knee?