The Wonder Of Light

The Liffey Descent is an annual event where canoeists from all over Ireland and indeed the world, flock to Dublin to canoe 17 miles down the River Liffey. The many weirs on the river presents photographers a superb opportunity to pick off the athletes with a long lens as they battle the white water. Now I know sports isn’t really my thing, but I was asked to stand in as a shooter on the day, to help the official photographer cover the event.

A lot of things were very new for me, but most importantly the commercial aspect of the shoot was very different. Normally I focus on trying to get one or two “killer” images from a shoot, where as the goal yesterday was to ensure every participant in the race was photographed at least once, so as to maximise the potential print sales. Each weir had two photographers, with instructions to cover different parts so as to ensure the maximum exposure. This makes a lot of business sense, but it took quite a bit of discipline to not follow the action if it was happening in the part of the weir where the other photographer was already covering

The settings used for shooting the images were also VERY different for me. I’m normally quite slow and methodical when I shoot and I always try and optimise the quality of the image coming out of the camera, even if it meant that post-processing is required following on from the shoot. So normally I shoot RAW, max resolution etc etc. The goal yesterday was expediency and efficiency. The images need to be collected, culled, resized, catalogued and uploaded to a website with the competitors numbers searchable.. all within a few hours of the shoot

So, I was shooting on medium sized JPG, sharpening turned up high, Nikon’s Active-D lighting enabled (set to high), saturation pushed and colour space set to sRGB, all with the intention being that the images are ready for sale pretty much straight out of the camera.

Equipment wise, I was shooting on my D3 with a Nikkor 300mm f:2.8 lens attached to a 1.4x teleconverter. So all in all I was shooting at about 400mm and probably stopped down to about f8 for the majority of the shots (to help with missed focus) and changing ISO so as to keep my shutter speeds in and around 1/1000. My problem was that I ended up being a little trigger happy. At that resolution (medium res JPG), with a fast card, super fast focus, the D3 was spitting out 9~11 frames per second. It was so easy to just stand there and hold your finger on the shutter. I knew a lot of the frames would be wasted or indeed duplicates, but the thinking behind it was that at that sort of speed, I was bound to catch a few special moments. That was the goal anyway.

What I didn’t really factor into it was the amount of shots I’d have to handle It wouldn’t be untypical for me to shoot Gigs of data on a shoot, considering RAW files are 15MB or so. My work flow, my tools (Bridge and Photoshop) and my PC are all well capable of handling large amounts of data, but what they’re not set up for are handling large amounts of images from one shoot. I shot over 3800 images Everything pretty much fell over. Renaming the files took for ever. Previewing the files and culling the out of focus and badly exposed images… took for ever. Bridge just came to a standstill working in this folder. It was painful… very very painful.

It was an interesting experience and definitely a learning one. I’ve learned that commercial photography is more about making money than it is about taking pictures. I’ve learned that shooting is a lot of hard work, particularly when it’s not your “genre”. And I’ve learned to ease off on the trigger finger. I never again want to preview that many images. But I’ve also learned that a long lens and some canoeists in white water can produce some pretty dramatic images.

Tags: canoe, colour, dublin, liffey descent, river, sport

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 6th, 2009 at 7:48 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.