Wings Over Scotland

Since we’ve already been nice to a journalist today, it seems only fair to also send out a little bit of love to the press corps’ less-celebrated and much-maligned brothers in arms – the photographers. (We don’t know why we’re being so pleasant to everyone all of a sudden. We think someone may have slipped something in our tea.)

Rangers FC has been in administration since Valentine’s Day. That’s three long months in which the story has featured in the news pretty much every single day, and it’s not a situation that lends itself particularly well to illustration. One picture of a Duff & Phelps press conference looks much like another, and once you’ve knocked out the traditional broken-club-crest it starts to get tricky to find a fresh visual angle.

The nation’s photo-journalists have risen heroically to the challenge, though, and we feel irresistibly compelled to take a moment out from our day to offer them a heartfelt and genuine salute, before whatever this stuff is wears off.

For a story that isn’t really about players or management staff or people the average passing punter would recognise, the obvious place to go is the club’s stadium. Ibrox is the lensman’s friend in that regard – it’s a notable and photogenic location in its own right, a partially-listed building designed by architect Archibald Leitch, who was the brains behind over 20 football grounds around the turn of the century.

Leitch’s imposing red-brick main stand at Ibrox has provided plenty of illustrative material for the media since Rangers entered administration, but the really creative stuff has centred around the stadium’s main gate.

(Or rather, its main gates plural – until we came to write this piece we didn’t actually know that there were two. At the corner of the main stand and the Broomloan Road end stands the original stadium entrance, while there’s a similar, but less ornate and considerably uglier, version at the Copland Road end. The old and newer gates have each featured prominently in articles about what tasteless commentators are calling the Third Ibrox Disaster, so we’ll be taking in a selection encompassing both.)

We’ll start with a fairly standard shot of the old gates at the Broomloan end. This one’s from a story on the website of Business Recorder.

The Mirror offers us some close-up detail from the left-hand side.

While the Telegraph, as is its wont, shoots from the right.

Ulster TV provides the view from below, gazing unto the heavens.

The Guardian takes even more of a worm’s-eye perspective.

And Eurosport presents a jaunty 30-degree tilt, noteworthy for being one of an incredibly small number of pics in existence which actually show the gates open.

Channel News Asia pulls away to give a more complete picture.

The Herald goes right round the side to bring in some local colour.

The Scotsman turns slightly the other way to get the Broomloan stand in instead.

And finance website Here Is The City backs slowly across the road to give us a couple of nice live-action matchday shots and some wider context. (The listed main stand is to the right, though the visible glass-walled section is a modern addition.)

An easy and popular way to provide a bit of variation is to take shots in different environmental lighting conditions, like this gloomy effort from Football Filter.

Clever use of weather can provide a visual lead-in for developments in the story. This one from the Guardian could signify either ominous gathering clouds or a bright shaft of sunlight breaking through, depending on the day’s events.

Whereas shooting at night-time, as seen in another Guardian image above, creates a much more unambiguous atmosphere of foreboding.

We can’t remember if it was still snowing in Scotland in February, so The Sun might have been cheating a little with this shot, which was used under a headline describing Rangers’ financial “meltdown”.

This interesting pic from the Daily Record combines the “sky” motif from the Guardian image with evoking the Sun’s monochrome shot. We’re not quite sure where it was taken – the gates look identical to the Broomloan Road ones, but we can’t see how the Record could possibly have cropped the stands out.

Is there a third “RANGERS FOOTBALL CLUB LTD” gate we don’t know about, or is it a Photoshop job foreshadowing how the Ibrox site could look in a couple of years’ time when the salvage merchants are done with it? We just don’t know, sorry.

That does remind us to get in a few shots (this one’s the Guardian again) of the Copland Road gates, though. Not quite so pretty. we think you’ll agree.

The Scotsman tried bravely to present them in a marginally more flattering light.

And the Telegraph took advantage of some typical Glasgow weather/road maintenance to at least display them with a bit of artistry that was clearly beyond their creators.

While Sky Sports employed an admirably inventive solution to the problem, by cutting the unattractive gates themselves out of the shot entirely.

Taking a similar approach with the Broomloan gates produced some pretty impressive results, which featured in, of all places, Catering Insight magazine.

By now the potential of the objects themselves was pretty much exhausted, so intrepid snappers started humanising their images with passers-by, such as in this image which will already be familiar to Wings Over Scotland readers.

Channel 4 News went with a similar idea, with the addition of some bonus comedy value thanks to the inclusion of a bear and a bloke on a bike.

But this superb effort from the Telegraph at the Copland gates takes the prize.

When random members of the public got thin on the ground, resourceful shutterbugs – like the one from Western Australia Today – captured people who’d gone to the ground with deliberate purpose.

And if none of those are to be found occurring naturally, you can always bring your own with you, as the Mirror did here.

The Guardian certainly got value for money out of this nice chap. (See comments.)

There’s a fine line with set-up photos, though. The Sun is laying it on a bit thick here.

And while the Telegraph starts well with this serious-looking pretend taxman…

…they just couldn’t help taking it too far. (Also, couldn’t they find the poor hapless reporter an actual briefcase? He looks like he’s going on a weekend mini-break to Zeebrugge, not doggedly trying to retrieve £100m of taxpayers’ money.)

We hope that you’ve enjoyed this light-hearted but sincere tribute to the inventiveness of the nation’s photojournalists. If you’ve spotted any great original twists on pictures of the Ibrox gates, send them in and we’ll add them to the gallery. For now, though, we’ll leave the last word to poker group The Hendon Mob.