Since it's my first day of much-needed leave, and since work commitments, work exhaustion, call it what you will, have prevented me from doing much photography this year, I'm going to break my usual rule of only one shot per day and put up two that I took this morning.

This is the first of these. Naturally, this is another experimental/learning/testing shot with my newly acquired, ultra wide angle 7-14mm f/2.8 Pro lens.

I love the wide open space in this shot, if I do say so myself; a minimalist vibe with just the goalposts (and, if you look closely, a bird perched above the goalposts) for relatively close detail. And, of course, the big sky with the flowing clouds above.

I've been on a health binge this year, determined to bring my weight back a bit and my fitness up. (Not helped by the roof of my gymnasium collapsing a few months ago.) As part of that, I have been doing a lot of calcio ("soccer" to you, barbarian, though I'll accept "football") practice over the last couple of months. I'm mostly doing it solo, so early in the morning, just after sunrise, you will often see me on a pitch very much like this one with nothing but me, the ball, the wide open spaces and the goalposts for company. (And, of course, my mobile phone strapped to my arm playing the latest audiobook I've bought, or the audio edition of The Economist. There's nothing like making the perfect chip kick accompanied by Michael Palin narrating his Hemingway Adventure.)

Perhaps it's just the fact that it's a welcome respite from work, or perhaps it's something more than that, but whatever the reason this sort of place is starting to feel very much like home, at least for the 30 or 40 minutes that I can boot and chase the ball up and down the field before needing a respirator to be able to breathe again. It's therefore probably more a personal shot than an artistic one in that it has a meaning (feeling, vibe, call it what you will) to me that it may not have to a casual viewer.

I think the second shot, which I will put up later today, is objectively a better shot, but since part of the purpose of this gallery is to serve as a personal diary I felt a strong need to include it for that purpose.