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Playing catch up

Frederick Area’s Mason Hinz, left and teammate Stephen Achen, right, celebrate after their 1600 meter relay team won the class B boys race Saturday at the State Track and Field Meet at Howard Wood Field. Photo by John Davis taken 5/28/2022

An observation I made years ago as a sports photographer was that when the final whistle sounds, the players clean up and go home or unwind. The fans in the stands try to beat the traffic to get home and put up their feet to watch television. The radio announcer does his wrap up show, coaches interview, final stats and commercials then packs up to go get some rest.

But for the sports photographer or television camera person the job is still not over. In fact you could say it is just beginning. The television person has to package and piece together at least one-minute-thirty-seconds of highlights and voice over info from the game on deadline and then for the most part their day is through.

As for myself and my other still photographer brethren, we have countless images to edit through to meet our employer’s demands. Years ago, before digital cameras, that was developing a couple of rolls of film and making a few prints. These days it can mean editing down to six or eight photos to accompany one or more stories and/or whittling the take down to 10-20 images for a gallery.

Mind you I enjoy taking dozens and dozens of images when I am at an event. But some larger events leave me with time constraints even though I have a loose deadline of 6 a.m. for this website. This was very evident this past weekend at the State Track and Field Meet. 

The new three-day format meant being done at the track about 6 p.m. Thursday and about 7 p.m. Friday while on Saturday we were driving back to Aberdeen by 4:30 p.m.

But the work wasn’t complete then.

Thursday night I was filing images until 2 a.m. and called it quits knowing there was a 7 a.m. wake-up call. So on Friday I ( and my 60-year-old body) made a decision— Midnight curfew. So I did all I could until midnight, covered my bases and got some sleep. Saturday I did the same. And the website still looked great each day with all the photos and stories.

If you follow the site well enough you saw that I posted two additional galleries on Sunday and Monday. There was a total of over 200 photos of area athletes competing at the meet. For some of them it was their last time in high school. For others it may have been their first. I tried to keep that in mind while editing to allow a keepsake for those graduating and file art for next year of any underclass participants.

I hope I don’t sound like I am grumbling, I love making the images. In fact I am a bit of a hoarder when it comes to editing. If it is in focus and you can see a face, I save it. But I thought I would give a little inside baseball as to how the process is done in order to appreciate the effort I make to record the effort the athletes make.

While the images I make with my current camera are pretty good, I have been contemplating purchasing a new camera with the capability of 30 frames per second. That could really make it difficult to stick to a midnight curfew.

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