Chelsea softball faced Manchester.

At Chelsea’s softball stadium, there are few good open vantage points for photography: there are no breaks or low points in the fence, and the umps often aren’t excited about having a gate open even just a little.  (That also puts me in the way of players entering and exiting the field.)  The best answer, then, is to shoot over the fence, which leaves one real option: the roofs of the dugouts.

Though it would be nice to be able to shoot the game at field level, the dugout roof does offer two advantages: first, some players are hilariously startled when they see a person in a usually unpopulated location; second, I get a little bit of a different perspective for some interesting photos.  This is one such photo:

The other such photo — one of my favorites of the year — is later in this post.

Here’s the other fun photo I got thanks to my spot on top of the dugout:

The following is another one of my favorite photos of the year.  For me as a photographer, it’s exciting to get a photo like this: