For maximum effect, crank up your speakers and experience or re-experience being in the middle of the San Jose Earthquakes supporters' section at MLS Cup 2003!!!

For most of these videos, I was holding my camera far above my head and was not able to see the LCD screen on the back. I had to guess which angle to hold it at and was just hoping that I was capturing at least some of the action. As you will see, that wasn't always the case. At least the audio came out okay. I don't expect to get any offers from ESPN or ABC to join their video crew.

This first video was actually an accident. I was trying to take a picture of the aftermath of Ronnie Ekelund's goal, five minutes into the match. The S400 has a dial on top that you use to set the shooting mode to automatic, manual, stitch, or movie. While I love the fact that the camera is small enough to fit in my pocket, when I pull it out, the dial often gets turned to a different mode than I had left it in. So, I ended up with a 1 second movie of Zach Thornton laying on the ground and the rest of the players walking away from the goal.

Here's about 30 seconds of video surrounding the final whistle. Unfortunately, I aimed the camera too low early on, but I tilted it back up just in time before Onstad takes the last kick of the game. Look for Jon Conway and Josh Saunders near the end of the video, racing across the field to celebrate with Goalkeeper of the Year Pat Onstad. This file is 2.2 MB.

Soon after the game ended, the players walked over to celebrate their incredible victory with the Casbah in section 126 and the other enthusiastic Earthquakes fans in the surrounding sections. Notice how Landon Donovan, wearing his brand spanking new MLS champions hat, runs from way in the back toward the fans and (though you can't quite see it here) jumps up to hang over the rail. On his way back, the hat is gone. This file is 5.6 MB.

After the MLS Cup trophy was presented to the players, they made a return visit to our section to celebrate. This file is 2.8 MB.

I shot these videos with my groovy little Canon S400 digital camera. The original videos were 320x320 resolution AVI files. The S400 saves 15 frames per second for up to 3 minutes before it needs to write the data to a compact flash card. I used iMovie to convert the videos to QuickTime and edit them down to reasonable sizes. Two of the original videos were over 20 MB.

If you would like to have the audio track extracted from these videos and don't know how to do that, email me at robert AT wombatnation DOT com and I can help you out.