I started out my photography career shooting for daily newspapers. You don't really get to specialise when you shoot newspaper work - you do whatever is needed at the time. This could be anything from a breaking news job to a corporate portrait or a plate of food for a restaurant review. Quite often it meant sport.
I photographed a lot of sport over the years - football, rugby, tennis, athletics, golf, volleyball, cricket, badminton, gymnastics, basketball, cycling... the list goes on. Mostly though, being in Cardiff, it would be football and rugby.
Sports photography, more than any other kind, relies on repetition - the more you shoot a particular sport, the better you get at it. Knowing when to click the shutter depends on being able to predict what's going to happen next. If you see it through the viewfinder then you missed the picture. I don't get a chance to stretch my sports photography muscles very often when shooting weddings, although the same principles of timing and capturing "the moment" apply equally to documenting a wedding. But when an impromptu football match was started on the lawn at Margam Orangery after a recent wedding reception I took the chance to get some interesting pictures of the action.
The difference here was that I could be on "the pitch" with the players. You don't get to do that at Cardiff City! It meant I could be in amongst the players with a wide angle lens and get a nice dynamic shot with some interesting backlighting. Covering a football match for a newspaper usually means getting tight action shots with maybe two or three players in. Here I wanted to include more context and tell the story by showing where they were playing and who was involved.