Lessons learned from photographing a sailing event for a whole week

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to photograph a six-day national sailing event close to home. It was not my first event by any means but I am making photography my primary occupation so I really wanted to make a good impression on the organisers and competitors. 

To that end I set myself two clear objectives:

• To make all the photos available for competitors to view after each day's racing
• To produce a high-quality portfolio for the organisers, competitors and other members of that class association to be able to browse through and chose image to be printed.

It seemed to me that there were two qualities of image required here. To meet the first objective a reasonable quality JPEG would suffice while the second objective would require a RAW file which could be manipulated later.

Brilliant. That seemed straight forward enough. I set my Nikons to RAW + JPEG Fine with the intention of taking lots of photos each day. What could be simpler than displaying the JPEGs on the club TV while the competitors quaffed an ale or two in the bar? Well, after day one it seemed that getting images up on the TV by the evening may have been a surprisingly ambitious goal.  With two races sailed on that first day, there were some 1,000 images spread over two cameras. I had the task of deleting all of those which were either not in sharp focus or where the composition could not be saved with a bit of straightening and cropping. 

To be blunt, I wasted hours transferring the images from my cameras to my laptop. I also wasted more time editing them on the laptop where even waiting for them to open was painful. I was only making the simplest of horizon corrections, a slight crop here and there or deleting them if necessary but the whole process just dragged. The final step of transferring the images to a thumb drive also extended the operation to something close to self-inflicted torture. By the time I was ready, the evening social event was well under way. I meekly sidled around the edge of the room and slipped the thumb drive into the USB socket of the clubhouse T.V. I then retreated as the images of the first couple of races appeared.  

Fortunately, the competitors were so delighted to see themselves in action that they were totally accepting of any duff images that had slipped through the net. I kept my head down and vowed to myself that day two would be better.

That night I struck upon, what I thought was, a brilliant idea. The organisers were using Whatsapp to communicate with the competitors. I decided that an easier method of getting the images to the competitors was to use a google drive folder to save the day's images and share this folder through Whatsapp. This actually worked very well and after a bit of experimentation with folder permissions I used this technique for the rest of the week. Objective number one sorted.

To hit my second goal, I decided to work on the RAW files to straighten, crop and correct any big exposure errors. I had, perhaps naively, assumed that I could get this done during the evening ready to export the final images as high-quality JPEGS to go into an online portfolio. 

Working with large RAW files in a photo editor is slow going at the best of times but to try to do this during an evening when you are under pressure (self-inflicted I know) was close to impossible. In an attempt to meet the intention, I tried several pieces of software and photo editors that I believed would help but all I was doing was wasting more time waiting for the images to load and confusing myself when I went to save them.

For the sake of my sanity, I had to think of a better way to manipulate the images to a state where I could display them without having to spend a lifetime uploading them and the viewer, another lifetime downloading them. I decided to shelve objective two for the week and to concentrate fully on getting the images displayed after racing each day. In the end, the answer was so obvious I could slap myself.

Infact, I have had approximately three months after the event to slap myself but at last I have come up with a solution that works for me. I have worked out the best (in my opinion) way to display the images for approval purposes and then produce the high-quality printable art later. 

Three months sems like a long time but it took a couple of false starts, including some unnecessary website updates and a storage approach that others photographers might find surprising. That said. I have completed the task and am very pleasewd with the result. 

To save any aspiring watersports / event photographers some pain, here are the lessons I learnt.

Cull in the camera

This is such a simple thing and yet it had completely passed me by. The problem with large storage cards is that you can afford to be a bit sloppy with your technique and just keep all the images you take. Sadly, when shooting from a moving boat and when using continuous high, there is a very good chance that your composition will be off or the image will be out of focus. Using the LCD screen on the back of the camera, scrolling through and pressing delete twice (on a Nikon anway) is so much faster than using a laptop.  The added advantage of course is that once this initial cull is complete, there will be far fewer files to transfer and manipulate later.

Archive the RAW files and put them aside for later.

This was a no brainer really. What was I doing trying to edit RAW files in the first place? Do I have some sort of Masochistic bent which leads me to stupid decisions like this? Probably yes but I had shot the photos in RAW and Fine JPEG anyway. My though process at the time had been that I could quickly share the JPEGs on the same day to give the competitors something to look at while I went away to spend my evening editing the RAW files into masterpieces. In reality of course, most of these images will be looked at on a device of some kind. And at that, probably looked at once before being discarded. I only really needed to work on those images that the competitors wanted to have printed to hang in their study or over the mantlepiece or in the smallest room in the house. From this moment on I worked only on the JPEGs for the portfolio. 

Google Photos is any easy method of displaying images

Over the last few years, I have experimented with various on-line portfolios, blogs, websites and google drives, in an attempt to find something that allows me to share low resolution versions of my images with customers while I retain the hi resolution versions.  This year I have decided to use Google Photos and I like it. It does have disadvantages in terms of controlling permissions to download but the benefits outweigh the drawback in my opinion.

The first advantage is that google photo albums can be created fairly rapidly from a drive on a computer or, if you use google drive, then photos can be loaded directly from a folder. 

The second advantage is that google photos can be set to save data and carries out a bit of a downgrading to the quality of the image. This saves disk space (for google) but also reduces download time for your customers and means they have to come back to you for the hi resolution image if they want a lovely print.

And the final advantage to me is that Google Photos is free (ish)

Getting RAW files back from online storage wastes more time that loading them there in the first place!

Loading RAW file up to the cloud is fairly easy. Go to your online provider's web portal, create a new archive, select the files to upload, go and enjoy several cups of tea as while your files are gradually assimilated into the cloud...After a few hours the files are uploaded and you can delete the originals from your memory card ready to use again the following day except, Oops. Once the RAW files are up in the cloud, they are a pain to get back. Particularly if you try to bring them back en masse The online portal will compress them into a zip file and if there are a lot of images involved, it may create multiple zip files which can be very frustrating and even difficult to keep track of whether all your files are back.

Now, in reality, this should not be a huge problem if you are taking my advice from the previous lessons and only working on specific RAW files. In that case, downloading one image at a time is probably going to be ok. Just remember to keep the original file names on any low-resolution files that you share with your customer as that will save you oodles of time, trying to work out which raw file to work with.

Conclusion

So, there is an insight into how easy it is to weigh yourself down with unnecessary operations.  The temptation to take lots of images is very high so having a good method of working through the photos is paramount if you are:

a: going make a living and 

b: get to leave your desk 

I hope this has been useful. If you have a clever method for saving time after the actual shoot then please feel free to share it. I have made any huge blunders then please feel free to comment.

Richard