Simon Ridgway Photography

I was commissioned to shoot PR photos for a street football tournament in Newport by the organisers of the event. I’d spent some time photographing the action during some of the games and I’d also posed up a few team shots of the competitors. These were fine as record shots that the organisers could use later, but they also wanted something for an immediate press handout for the newspapers and I didn’t feel like I had anything that would make a good news picture.

I’d noticed one of the players doing “keepy-uppy” and was trying to figure out a way to make a picture from that. The problem with trying to photograph footballers is that they tend to always be looking at the ball at their feet, so you don’t see their face – which doesn’t make for a good picture.

The football pitch they were using had a couple of skateboard ramps nearby, so I came up with the idea of putting someone at the top of the skateboard ramp and shooting a silhouette against the sun. The railings would give it that urban “street” feel.

It worked even better than I had hoped.

I shot loads of pictures of this player trying to do keep-uppy on the small platform at the top of the ramp and got a couple of frames that worked, but this was the stand-out shot, simply because of the sunburst under his leg. There’s no way I could have achieved that effect by trying – it was pure luck. The sun is exactly between the edge of the railings and the edge of the leg – a bigger gap would have caused massive lens flare and ruined the picture.

I’ve heard this kind of happy accident described as being “visited by the photo fairies”.