My working agency are club photographers for Premier League Brentford FC. Thus when Brentford visit the clubs in the North West of England I often get asked to help the club photographer at those games.

The difference in the experience is huge. For a start, the access within the stadium is greater. You can get into the stadium earlier than the other photographers, you get tunnel access, go into changing rooms, and have access to shoot in areas around the pitch that would normally be off limits. Perhaps the  biggest difference is that they are only interested in images of players of their own club, so goals and celebrations and players portraits of the ‘other’ team are irrelevant. That may sound obvious but in normal games those are the prized images to get so it just seems very strange not to even have to bother taking them.

Things get even easier when the normal practice means there is no need to edit or caption my images - the club have their own editors and they know who the players are. I just have to send them out. That is also a big difference as it takes away most of my pitch side computer work and enables me to send out maybe three times the number of images than is usually possible.

Normally, when I go to games I am looking to get the best shots that I can of all the action across the match so I have to be continually alert to what is happening on the pitch in front of me. However, when I am only photographing one team there is less need for full on concentration - I am only really bothered when the ball comes into the half of the pitch closest to me i.e when the team I am following are attacking. Thus, it is a much easier all round experience.

My most recent experience was Manchester City v Brentford in the League Cup Quarter Finals (December 2025). Unfortunately it rained incessantly throughout the game. Photographers used to being at the Etihad know that when teams in the bottom  half of the table visit you only really get 45mins of photography. City just dominate possession and the other team barely get out of their own half. Thus, it was difficult getting ‘any’ images of Brentford players up close as they rarely ventured near me.

The one downside is that you are not going to see any of your images published in the press reporting of the game as the club have exclusive rights to those images for use in matchday programmes, promotion material, annual calendars etc.