Being an events photographer must be exhausting
Discussion
I stepped in today to help out at my daughters school photographing the end of year play (because of Covid no parents are allowed to attend so at least they will get a few shots of their child in costume). 60 kids, head shots, full length portraits, group shots. 3 hours in all - circa 400 images. I’m knackered! Being on your feet at a wedding all day and night or similar event must be exhausting!
Ah, that's the "first day on the job" enthusiasm, trying to capture as much as you can as you don't want to disappoint.
Once you get used to it, you learn to plan your time and pace yourself a bit more. You'll also start to develop a sixth sense instinct for which types of shot opportunity are about to make themselves available and to be ready for them.
Once you get used to it, you learn to plan your time and pace yourself a bit more. You'll also start to develop a sixth sense instinct for which types of shot opportunity are about to make themselves available and to be ready for them.
eltawater said:
Ah, that's the "first day on the job" enthusiasm, trying to capture as much as you can as you don't want to disappoint.
Once you get used to it, you learn to plan your time and pace yourself a bit more. You'll also start to develop a sixth sense instinct for which types of shot opportunity are about to make themselves available and to be ready for them.
Could well be! I certainly didn’t want to mess it up as apart from these images I think they are videoing it on an iPhone. Maybe took 4 or 5 images of a subject where 2 or 3 would have sufficed. Once you get used to it, you learn to plan your time and pace yourself a bit more. You'll also start to develop a sixth sense instinct for which types of shot opportunity are about to make themselves available and to be ready for them.
In this day and age of cheap memory cards, it's not necessarily a bad thing to take too many images of one subject as sods law they'll decide to blink or open their mouth in a funny but unattractive way in the shots you do have.
The downside is obviously this just gives you more to sift through during the processing phase and can drain your camera battery more quickly.
The downside is obviously this just gives you more to sift through during the processing phase and can drain your camera battery more quickly.
Itsallicanafford said:
I stepped in today to help out at my daughters school photographing the end of year play (because of Covid no parents are allowed to attend so at least they will get a few shots of their child in costume). 60 kids, head shots, full length portraits, group shots. 3 hours in all - circa 400 images. I’m knackered! Being on your feet at a wedding all day and night or similar event must be exhausting!
When I shot weddings the average day was 9 hours on site and 600 photos, shot RAW, edited and individualy processed to about 500 JPGs. Not so much exhaustng as satisfying, actually.I now keep my hand in with the local amdram group as their honorary tog just for fun.
I typically do about 11 hours at a wedding, being fit definitely helps, especially when you have back-to-back weddings. I won't typically book two days in a row, but due to COVID rescheduling I have a Sunday wedding, Monday wedding then up at 4am for a flight on Tuesday coming up, not looking forward to that!
Thankfully I have editing down to an art form and I've more than halved my edit time compared to when I started.
I know a guy who will go right through till the end of the night at a wedding, so often 9am to 2am (plus travel) and will only have the briefest of breaks to eat and he'll be back on it asap during the wedding breakfast, he takes his fitness seriously so he can manage that and stay focused.
Thankfully I have editing down to an art form and I've more than halved my edit time compared to when I started.
I know a guy who will go right through till the end of the night at a wedding, so often 9am to 2am (plus travel) and will only have the briefest of breaks to eat and he'll be back on it asap during the wedding breakfast, he takes his fitness seriously so he can manage that and stay focused.
ch37 said:
I know a guy who will go right through till the end of the night at a wedding, so often 9am to 2am
I found that after a certain point in the evening you've done all you can do; everybody's been photographed several times doing whatever they're doing and after a while you're just taking the same shots. I don't think my clients would have wanted a tog 'embedded' that long.I used to cover a music festival. Three days, 10am to 11pm. Fun but tiring. The main stages set a rule where you can be in the pit for three songs max and then you're out. The smaller stages had more freedom so you'd grab what you could on the main ones then rush over to the DJ tent and other stages until the next act came on the main stage. And repeat.
In between and as the days turned to evening, you'd have drunk, drugged up kids all begging to have their photo taken, middle aged Mums trying to be teenage girls showing you their boobs saying "take a shot of these lover"... And by the time the main act came on, you'd be knackered, trying to grab the shots whilst protecting yourself and gear from incoming pints and other liquid detritus.
It was terrific fun though.
In between and as the days turned to evening, you'd have drunk, drugged up kids all begging to have their photo taken, middle aged Mums trying to be teenage girls showing you their boobs saying "take a shot of these lover"... And by the time the main act came on, you'd be knackered, trying to grab the shots whilst protecting yourself and gear from incoming pints and other liquid detritus.
It was terrific fun though.
silobass said:
How do you process that many RAW images? Do you have a basic set preset to get things started?
I do and I imagine most others do. For weddings I have 4 presets, I apply a base one on import and then certain images may have one of the other 3 whilst editing (outdoor, indoor, B&W), almost all have some sort of tweaking though, but typically only white balance and crop.Ditto for motorsport, 2 presets I've been working on over the years, one for paddock and one for track, apply on import, tweak as required. 2000 images from Festival of Speed last night processed and uploaded in about 3 hours.
In my youth I thought I could earn a bit of extra money by helping a relative with wedding photos. His Mamiyaflex C3, with multiple lenses and multiple backs, was the thing, so some time ago.
He had three 'shoots' in one day, starting at 11am. I went with him to the first and brought spools of 620 back to his darkroom (attic, but expensively converted) and developed the negs. I'd just put them up to dry when I got the second lot. (The irritation of trying to get roll-film onto the spool when it was still a little damp. Horror. 620 went on forever.) I was just starting on the proofs for the first lot, using a Durst Reporter, cool but slow, when the third, and final, negs came in. He took over printing.
There were heaters that we used to dry the prints, and by about 7pm we'd completed the lot. There were about 7,000 prints for each wedding (figure based on subjective belief). We both went to the first wedding where we took orders for about an hour I suppose, then we split, taking one each of the remaining ones. I passed my sausage on a stick eating threshold. We got in around midnight, and wrote up the orders. I crashed on his sofa.
There were still the colour transparencies to get developed and printed but these were sent out.
I chose silk-screen printing for the evening job. One of my better decisions. Nowhere near the pressure.
One of the attractions of the house we bought in 1985 was the large loft, eminently suitable for conversion to a dark room. I had power and hot/cold water put in. But along came computers.
I had free access to my relative's darkroom for a couple of years, but then he took a job with an oil company as their resident illustrator.
He had three 'shoots' in one day, starting at 11am. I went with him to the first and brought spools of 620 back to his darkroom (attic, but expensively converted) and developed the negs. I'd just put them up to dry when I got the second lot. (The irritation of trying to get roll-film onto the spool when it was still a little damp. Horror. 620 went on forever.) I was just starting on the proofs for the first lot, using a Durst Reporter, cool but slow, when the third, and final, negs came in. He took over printing.
There were heaters that we used to dry the prints, and by about 7pm we'd completed the lot. There were about 7,000 prints for each wedding (figure based on subjective belief). We both went to the first wedding where we took orders for about an hour I suppose, then we split, taking one each of the remaining ones. I passed my sausage on a stick eating threshold. We got in around midnight, and wrote up the orders. I crashed on his sofa.
There were still the colour transparencies to get developed and printed but these were sent out.
I chose silk-screen printing for the evening job. One of my better decisions. Nowhere near the pressure.
One of the attractions of the house we bought in 1985 was the large loft, eminently suitable for conversion to a dark room. I had power and hot/cold water put in. But along came computers.
I had free access to my relative's darkroom for a couple of years, but then he took a job with an oil company as their resident illustrator.
silobass said:
How do you process that many RAW images? Do you have a basic set preset to get things started?
Me? I load them all into my RAW software of choice, Capture One, and go through them one by one. First I set white balance using the dropper, warm it up just a tad, then copy it to all images (it may change but it's a start). Then levels and curves to get each exposure just right. Sometimes you can copy those settings to a batch of images, sometimes not. For high contrast scenes I make two images, one for highlights and one for shadows, then combine them n Photoshop either by hand (if simple) or using a mask technique (if complex).I can do about 40 images before needing a break to reset my eyeballs, so it's just a question of slogging through and not letting standards drop. Quite glad I don't need to do it anymore!
StevieBee said:
Blimey!
Wouldn't you have been better with a 4K video camera and just grab the frames you like as images?
You'd essentially end up with 100s of thousands of images to sift through rather than a couple thousand, and they'd be of significantly less quality than the stills from my Nikon Z5, which itself is quite a way off of the resolution of many full frame cameras now.Wouldn't you have been better with a 4K video camera and just grab the frames you like as images?
You'd also lose a significant element of the creative side of photography. Most of the techniques used in motorsport photography would be off the table for a start. 2000 photos sounds like a lot but it's only 3 a minute during a full on day, every single one of those frames has a lot of thought put into it, with pulling from video you'd basically be doing half of that work during the editing process
I had a press pass for a LMES event at Le Mans. Pre race, the photographers in the press room were going through their images of the day before. The chap I wanted to talk with ran up about three rows of five images on his laptop, gazed at them for a few second, marked two or three, then went onto the next page. We used a couple of his images in a car club magazine - the chap worked for Daily Sports Car, (dailysportscar.com) - and they were just what we wanted. Put me in my place.
The website is worth a visit even if only for its images.
The website is worth a visit even if only for its images.
eltawater said:
Ah, that's the "first day on the job" enthusiasm, trying to capture as much as you can as you don't want to disappoint.
Once you get used to it, you learn to plan your time and pace yourself a bit more. You'll also start to develop a sixth sense instinct for which types of shot opportunity are about to make themselves available and to be ready for them.
I've done a couple of friends' weddings and even got paid to do a couple.Once you get used to it, you learn to plan your time and pace yourself a bit more. You'll also start to develop a sixth sense instinct for which types of shot opportunity are about to make themselves available and to be ready for them.
As you say, the desire to make sure nothing is missed means a LOT of photographs being rattled off and a lonnnng day.
I'm not sure I have the confidence to just 'choose' what moments to photograph
RSTurboPaul said:
I'm not sure I have the confidence to just 'choose' what moments to photograph
Anticipation of events and people movement is very important, as is being in the right place to get the composition.If you look through the viewfinder and think 'actually that's no good', don't press the button...
You have to go into a wedding with the mindset that you know what you're doing and that you're in charge (sort of), otherwise you get trampled by events.
ch37 said:
StevieBee said:
Blimey!
Wouldn't you have been better with a 4K video camera and just grab the frames you like as images?
You'd essentially end up with 100s of thousands of images to sift through rather than a couple thousand, and they'd be of significantly less quality than the stills from my Nikon Z5, which itself is quite a way off of the resolution of many full frame cameras now.Wouldn't you have been better with a 4K video camera and just grab the frames you like as images?
You'd also lose a significant element of the creative side of photography. Most of the techniques used in motorsport photography would be off the table for a start. 2000 photos sounds like a lot but it's only 3 a minute during a full on day, every single one of those frames has a lot of thought put into it, with pulling from video you'd basically be doing half of that work during the editing process
I was schooled in Motor Sports photography by Ford's racing snapper back in the 80s - he had this thing against motor drives and explained how you can read a race to anticipate what's likely to happen and concentrate on preparing the shot for when it does. He considered the use of a motor-drive as 'cheating'. I don't necessarily agree with that point of view but the approach has sort of stuck with me over the years. Some of my best racing shots (and interestingly those on which I made a bit of money) were captured with a single fire of the shutter.
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