Posts Tagged sport

Recently I was asked to write a monthly photography column for a sports magazine.  I thought “why the heck not, I’ll give just about anything a shot”.  Not sure how many months I’ll be able to come up with interesting content but as long as I can think something up that isn’t total drivel then I’ll keep writing.  Below is a look at the page, if you click on it you can view a full pdf of the page or if you’d prefer I’ve just reproduced the text below.

Click the photo to view the full pdf

“Want me to carry your bag for you?” is a request I get a lot – one that almost always follows the question “What are you up to this weekend?” Especially in Townsville during the NRL season.

I’ve been photographing sport since I first joined the (then) Townsville Sun’s NBL franchise as their team photographer in 1993.  I’m really chuffed to still be working with them now but my, how things have changed over these 17 years.  It’s a similar story with the North Queensland Cowboys – I started with them in 1995 and still photograph many of their training sessions and all of their NRL matches.

During this period photography has gone through major changes since Louis Daguerre invented the Daguerreotype in the mid 1800s.  Digital photography is now the norm. And what a godsend it is!

Until mid 1999, everything I shot was on film and the majority of my sports photography was shot on 35mm FujiPress 800 film.  When shooting NRL matches at night or NBL games indoors I would push this film to 1600 (by underexposing a stop) and then slow down the processing to allow the film to overdevelop by a stop to bring life back to the thin negative.  This was pretty commonplace as it allowed snappers to increase shutter speeds to a minimum of 1/500 with our f2.8 lenses wide open.  The downside was increased grain but with most of the images appearing in newsprint it really didn’t matter that much.

Processing?  At the stadium??

That’s right – a night covering a match always involved two unusual options.  Either find a local minilab near the stadium and offer enough cash for them to stay open until about 11.00pm on a Saturday night; or take a small processing kit to the stadium and have someone stand guard at the toilet door while you fumbled your way around in complete darkness trying to load and process film.  This was definitely the worst choice as the ‘aroma’ of toilets combined with that of the processing chemicals made for a VERY unpleasant evening at the footy!  To cap it off picture editors were often yelling for pics even before the match had started. That meant I would generally have to shoot the first 5 minutes of action, jump in my car and race to the lab where they would develop and then I would scan and upload about 8 pics (at a snail’s pace) and then race back to the stadium to continue shooting.  As you can imagine it was even worse if I were processing at the stadium!

Generally, I would shoot about eight rolls of film during a match, so I had just under 300 pics to pull off around 25 winners.

With all that in mind it’s hard to believe we still whinge and whine about how a particular memory card reader is a minute slower than another or how the white balance on one camera is slightly better than another.

While it isn’t an easy job it has become a lot more refined over the past 10 years.  I now shoot between 800-1200 pics during a match and have my first set of six pics uploaded and on the picture editor’s desk by the 10^th minute of the match. The picture desk would receive another 10-15 pics at half time and then another 15-20 after the match.  This is thanks to having my laptop set up on the sideline with a lightning-fast 3G connection.

But it’s not just the method of processing and getting pics transmitted that has improved – the gear has as well!  We can now get thousands of pics out of a single battery charge, we can store thousands of hi-res images on a card and we don’t have to really worry too much about things like white balance and perfect exposure.

Sounds pretty easy doesn’t it?

Well, keep your eye on a sideline snapper next time you are at a big match and you’ll see that there’s a lot more to it than just pushing a button!