I have decided to not only embrace my current role as “AFL photographer”, to try to perfect it, make it my Ikigai if you will, my point of practice towards perfection.
Already making some gains and that is mainly just by choosing to.
I did two matches on Sunday, both regional junior representation games, so fast, high quality games, especially the U17 girls game that was at least a match for the great game I attended last weekend.
I came away from the first day with about 1500 files over about 3 hours of play, which seemed restrained, but on processing about half were misses*, the other half split into “keepers”, “secondaries” and “don’t submit, but don’t trash”, the last three all go into the master file backup.
I was happy overall, but the processing time was still excessive and I felt there was plenty of fat to trim off the bone.
The field was wet and muddy, soon to break up, but the girls game defied that and was fast and flowing.
My favourite of the day. This is a more than 50% crop off the 300mm, so full ground coverage.
There is no doubt that luck plays a role, but only after you create a conducive space where you can exploit it.
The boys however produced a scrappy game, with rare points of acrobatic action and a matching low-end score.
On Monday, I was determined to be more precise, more surgical.
I do not use consecutive fire, taking singles only, so it is all about anticipation, timing and judgement. I feel the sniper nets more efficient results than the machine gunner and certainly stays more engaged with the game and saves time in processing.
This is gear related to some extent.
The EM1x in silent mode with the stabilised 300 or 40-150 (f2.8 or 4) give me a gentle experience, I am a silent viewer, slicing out moments with speed and precision and thanks to the reactiveness of the camera, the AF speed of the lenses and plenty of practice (plus the afore mentioned luck), it feels instantaneous and intuitive.
It is basically down to me.
I can get better and the gear limitation envelope is deep enough to cover me as I improve. It is down to my skill level, I doubt the gear will top out, which is reassuring.
Two games again, U14’s this time and the roles slightly reversed. The girls game was good, probably close to yesterday’s, again defying the ever more stressed surface and to add to the mix, we had even more rain over night.
The boys game however was more like the fast and flowing game I was hoping for the day before.
Just after a few of us on the sidelines had been discussing the poor judgement of seagulls as to where to settle, they contributed to this file. Kind of sums up provincial football.
The second day was matched in every way, but with under 1000 files total.
Many of these are the mandatory team and pre-post game shots, the rest are action captures or events (I avoid player embarrassing moments, but document injuries etc, a habit from the paper) and I try to get every player doing something “heroic”, but know I fail too often.
A perfect game?
Maybe 200 files a game, all useful, every person and all image “shapes” covered, but I have a long way to go.
*Misses are basically useless for my needs, not always out of focus or even poorly composed, just lesser files to the better ones or suffering “intruders” cutting across the view as I took them.