Essex Blades 1st vs King's Lynn Fury - Photographing Basketball

An Essex player passes the ball

I have only had this blog a month and have already racked up a backlog of posts that I should have written and photos that I should have uploaded. Not good! Anyway, my post today is about a basketball match between Essex and King's Lynn Men's 1st which happened on the 20th February.

SXDance Upstage 2016 - Photographing Dancing For The First Time

University of Essex (SXDance) Wilcard Commercial - my favourite photo from the day

Last month, I received an email from the Vice President of  the University of Essex Dance Club, known as SXDance, asking if I'd be interested in photographing their upcoming multi-uni, multi-genre competition. She had been referred to me from my previous work photographing rowing and athletics, which I will post about in the coming weeks. The difference here is that once I'd said I was game, she asked "how much would you like to be paid?". Now this was new for me - previously I'd had expenses such as lunch on the day paid for but never an hourly rate! 

How I Made Almost £200 From Matched Betting - A Very Brief Guide

Credit - SlightlyAstray.com

As a quick disclaimer, this is absolutely not a 'get rich quick' scheme nor is it something I want to be regularly blogging about. I simply consider it worth it to inform other students out there of this relatively risk free method for earning a little bit of money on the side.

A few weeks ago, around the end of January, my friend G said he couldn't play games just yet because he was finishing up with some 'matched betting'. This made me curious because it takes a lot for G to not have the time to hop on Skype and start up a game and he also isn't the sort to recklessly gamble. When he was free, he told me to Google it and have a look at some sites about it. Essentially, matched betting is when you 'back' a result (e.g. Manchester United will beat Leicester) and also 'lay' a bet (in this case, Manchester will either lose or draw with Leicester). You do this by signing up to bookmakers and claiming the free promotional sign up rewards - free bets in most instances. Importantly for me, this is both legal (as long as you're 18!) and relatively little work, it being more of a waiting game than anything. G said he'd made a little bit but expected to make a lot more once he'd looked into it more. I tagged along and started doing it myself.

Building A Writing Portfolio And Making Money At The Same Time

Girl hurdling at Colchester Garrison Athletics Track

I am only in my first year of university and I am already at a quandary as to what I am going to do after my four years here in order keep myself of the streets. My go to career I brought up when inquisitive relatives and family friends asked how I was going to spend my time after leaving education was initially always "Journalism". This later narrowed to "sports or technology" and finally, simply "sports journalism" which was always sure to receive a plethora of encouraging nods and an enthused "oh, interesting". Yet even trying to blog is proving difficult for me despite the abundance of spare time I currently have. I worry that the creative flame I used to have for story-telling and writing in general has steadily been extinguished further and further since turning my focus to 'content'.

Welcome to the blog

Converted dual seat TR9 Spitfire lies in a field near Woodchurch

I have finally committed to setting up a blog that I will use to document my thoughts, photos, travels and experiences. Hopefully this will last longer than some of my previous attempts at blogging in which I limited myself to niches such as technology at an age where I couldn't afford anything I wanted to review and had to resort to curating snippets of other people's work (read - blatant plagiarism) into a post of my own.

This photo is one of my favourites. I took it in September of last year when a vintage Spitfire crashed just a few fields from my family home in Kent. After taking off from our neighbour's airfield, it was on its way to be sold for around £3.5 million when it suffered engine failure and was forced to turn back before crash landing in a field soon after the problems began. When I emailed him about, Rob (the neighbour) had this to say: 

"I was at Goodwood, I had flown the Mk.18 Spitfire over from the Hangar 10 Museum at Heringsdorf in Germany, for the Goodwood meeting.  I also flew the TR9 Spitfire but on my way up to Biggin Hill, it suffered engine failure and I had to force land it, not too far from your house, as I was unable to make it back to the Airfield. It is repairable and I was unscathed!."

My dad heard an awful noise above him as headed back from town and stood on the drive watching various emergency vehicles pass on the way to the scene but he was unsure what had happened until the news reports began coming in, briefly making the small village of Shadoxhurst national news! In the evening, when my little sister had returned from school and I from work, we walked the short distance across the fields as a family to take some photos, the best, in my opinion, being this one. Normally I would have brought my Nikon D3200 with me but I had stupidly let the batteries run flat so this was taken with an LG G2. Thankfully, the lovely sunset was still captured.

Please stay involved with my blog for more posts like this, often accompanied with a photo of my own.

Relevant links:
News report on the incident
Larger picture and my 500px account
More information on Rob Davies MBE
Rob's personal website - Woodchurch Warbirds