Soccer Players on Santos Beach-Brasil
- Adam Monk
- Oct 22, 2010
- 2 min read
Back in 2003/2004 i spent a year travelling around Brasil, a country of amazing diversity. Why i was there is another story for another day, but i took a vast number of images in that year (the majority of them on the Hasselblad XPan), most of which have never seen the light of day. I put the first one up last week, and gradually i will be putting more and more of them here as i think the Blog is a great place to finally show them and eventually create a category on the website for that and other adventures.
During my stay in Brasil i lived in a city called Santos for several months, which is on the coast of Sao Paulo state. Santos has the dubious honour of being the largest port in South America, with all the pleasures that brings… Santos also has a very long open beach, and on any given day there are always loads of Soccer games running, of all ages, from 3 or 4 year olds playing with 2 sticks for goals, to semi professional clubs having play offs. Being Brasilians, most of them are great soccer players, so the games are exciting to watch and the sheer number happening at once is a fantastic thing to witness.
This particular day was a Sunday, a big day for beach Soccer, and about 10am a dense fog rolled in off the sea. Now fog is great for photography, especially Black and White Photography, and fog in Santos was totally unheard of. So i grabbed the XPan and ran off to the beach.
These teams playing here are in fact one team split into 2 sides for the day. One side wearing white shorts the other black. You’ll notice all the team shirts are the same and this is in fact the seniors division of Santos Football club, the team made famous by the magical Pelé. He’s not in this shot…
The official name for this image is “Futbol na Paraia, Santos” Soccer player on Santos beach-Brasil, but the unofficial name is “Caralho!” because thats what the goalie was heard to shout just as this image was taken. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what it means…
It was shot on Kodak Tri-X 400 on the Hasselblad XPan with the 45mm lens, which due to the extended field of view, makes it the equivalent of about a 24mm in standard 35mm speak.
The fog gives it a beautiful soft look with the background fading away nicely. The white disk visible in the sky is in fact the sun, and if you look closely (click on the image), you can see the edge of the water on the far left of the image.
Can you guess which player kicked the goal?