ECB Get Set Weekend
at Stratford Cricket Club
Community Sport and Volunteer Photography, Commissioned
Get Set Weekend is the ECB's volunteer weekend, the one where community cricket clubs get themselves ready for the season before a ball is bowled. I photographed it for the England and Wales Cricket Board with Toyota at Stratford Cricket Club, on Swan's Nest Lane in Stratford-upon-Avon. The brief was to show the impact rather than the branding: real people doing real jobs for their own club, from a professional player working alongside volunteers to Toyota staff with paintbrushes in their hands.
The temptation on a day like this is to photograph the activity. What actually carries it is the paperwork and the tea break. I shot most of it on a 50mm at f1.2, close enough to be in the conversation and quiet enough not to stop it, so the frames that matter are a hand pointing at a name in a handwritten scorebook, a volunteer calling across the outfield, two women in front of the nets deciding what happens next. I used the 70 to 200mm for the working shots, where standing back was the only way to leave people alone with the job.
I wrote about this weekend in more detail in Capturing the Heart of Cricket in Communities. It sits alongside my other cricket work: the Metro Bank Girls in Cricket Fund campaign with the ECB, and women's cricket in Bermuda. See the wider sports photography portfolio, or commissions for campaign and brand work.
If you are a governing body, a charity or a brand partner and you need the volunteers in your programme photographed like people rather than like proof, let's talk.