AFL football at the highest level is a joy to photograph. Unfortunately for full enjoyment I would need to have a personal interest in it, because identifying the players, who are only numbered on the back, often tend to look similar and move really quickly can be tough.
many times you get the shot you want, then have to chase the numbers on the back of players running in three or four different directions.
All of the above are passable images, but they all failed the submission folder, because at least one players name was an uncertainty on the night (many have been confirmed since).
The curse for me is, the sports I like to shoot are not the ones I have an interest in.
The other little niggle, and this is one as old as news papers, is that in print, horizontal rules. You may be lucky to get one or two long verticals a page and the problem is, AFL is a “tall” sport.
Players pushing 2m on average, leaping regularly and high means a lot of wasted real estate to the sides if shot horizontally.
Most of the ones above have been cropped to vertical, so over half the frame is wasted. Shame only one or two may get used so only a few get supplied.
So, all this will go away when we go fully digital?* Unfrotunately for us, no. The powers that be, likely not photographers, decided that a uniform 16:9 ratio is the best for web. This effectively means no more marking images.
*Currently we make content first for print, then flesh it out for digital, but the looming cloud is doing only digital at our end with a separate print editorial team making a paper from that.