Life is very different around here at the moment. Beautiful sunny Autumn days have been the perfect back drop for my new found contentment and “perfect” life.

The main school is being supplemented by the old school giving me the odd job (no conflict, different dynamics), some sport through the state’s primary AFL and Cricket licensee and my volunteer agencies.

I needed to go back through my Examiner files looking for a football match to help out a school employee. Lots of images, lots of thoughts bubbling up.

I have been hard on myself in retrospect. I always felt the pressure of getting names and the needed shot out weighed the challenge of the images themselves and tended to shelve my happy self, letting a less open, more “on the job” side take over.

The relative freedom I feel with schools, the ability to just shoot and shoot, no captions needed, few limits in time or content and full support for me chasing my perfect images, is a far cry from my mindset at the paper.

It seems, in the early days at least, my efforts did net me the images I liked as well as the ones I needed, or maybe I ditched the ones that were frustratingly pointless and have forgotten.

Some examples of what was needed, what I did, what else I did and maybe a chance to go easier on myself. All of these examples come from a random period late last year in a one of the last folders I searched (fruitlessly), but before I became too locked into a negative spiral of self doubt*.

A swimming event (state school age club championships I think).

These are fun for the school, tougher for the paper. The need to identify the swimmers puts a bit of pressure on. Bobbing heads in a constant rotation of events does not always give you much time to work with.

The images can be tricky, but you soon learn to pick the right strokes. Butterfly is king, netting images like the ones below effortlessly.

Breast stroke comes next, basically the same but without the drama.

The other strokes are generally time wasters, so a few as able, then go hunting for something different, try to tell a story and use the environment.

I spent about an hour at this even (too long really) at the start of a busy Saturday shift.

I remember enjoying the photography, especially beating the challenges of location, notorious for mediocre light and humid conditions, but the captioning still sits heavily. The process was, to shoot the running board (LED on the wall over my shoulder), which thankfully matched up with a well organised race and lane allocation system I had been given a copy of, then shoot the competitors, concentrating on the two local clubs (blue and white caps).

I submitted about twenty images, managed to get the needed podium shot of a local champion and felt generally lucky that the right events were on when I arrived and the meet was well organised.

The reality is, the podium shot will be used if relevant to the story, the best of the action shots, maybe a small gallery online, but only if a filler is needed.

It is not always this easy.

Netball can be tricky.

Poor light, the stop-start nature of the game, teams ranging from well named and numbered and often recognisable athletes, to school children swapping position bibs mid quarter with patchy or non existent team sheets and volunteered “overseer” parents or even staff who do not know all the players by sight, can make it less fun.

I learned very quickly with higher grade netball, you do not chase the ball, you stalk the player. With only seven per side, a strict time limit on ball possession, limited court access and quick hands, most players will see the ball each change of direction. Basically they will give you an in-and-out shot each, sometimes more and often contested.

Plan B is under the net or approaching action in attack, but these tend to be messy and repetative.

Add some down time or sideline shots and you are done.

One quarter should be enough, two if the game is top tier, but often you are just creating work for yourself. You do get a feel for when you have your half a dozen minimum.

In this type of environment you often do feel like the better images are lost as you have to shoot the player’s backs (with their names) straight after a decent contest, often breaking your rhythm.

In the other example above of a worst case scenario (still my most remembered horror story), I had to find out a name from a school friend in the crowd, who often had to google their correct spelling, then stalk that one player, then repeat.

I was covering two games on adjacent courts at the same time, so it became a matter of one team-one end, each quarter (the attacking team so they faced me). The journalist concerned, a cadet doing their sport rotation, decided instead to do a story on a coach they found late in the day doing their 40th carnival and only one action shot was ever used!

*To put this in context, I had plenty of support from most quarters at the paper, the sports and editorial journalist often become friends, but the photo pool was a split between cool distance and bored but supportive. I flew the flag for video content creation, much to the annoyance of others and tended to “over shoot”, which ironically meant that even after I left, a lot of my images were used to cover the JackJumpers basketball team who won the national title this year and for previews of footballers coming into the new season.