Tenderness

This image was taken, during what was perhaps the 10th time that I watched a big soccer game, live in the stadium. In the early years I always took my camera to take the stadiums to do sport photos. Unfortunately, I was always disappointed with them. Sportphotography is mostly very harsh an sharpness is what people want to see. Sometimes motion blur is used to make the action more dynamic, but yet sport images are dominated by harshness.

As I was shooting that day, gradually getting bored with it, I started playing around with the manual focus and that was when I took this type of picture. The image above showed me something that I miss in sportphotography: tenderness (Zärtlichkeit). In my opinion, the lack of focus gives the whole image a poetic touch. Even in photography it can be useful to see something with less “precision” in order to abstract and thus perceive a situation on a different level.