Sideline Report: End-of-season editing

So the collegiate sports year is basically over, right?

I mean, lets face it, the Gators aren’t booking any hotel rooms in Omaha for a baseball comeback anytime soon.

So what does that leave us photographers to do?

Cleaning cameras only takes a few hours and while I have been accused of being a little obsessive, I’m not breaking out the alcohol swabs every day to make sure my Nikon logo is spotless.

A lot of the offseason involves pecking away at a keyboard and mouse trolling through the tens of thousands of photos that hit the cutting room floor before they chosen ones make it to press.

Editing through the Florida / Texas A&M game.

That sounds easy, right? Just select all and delete. Sadly, no.

We keep every photo taken at every game - just in case.

Just in case that right guard from that highly competitive non-conference football game against the Norfolk State Scuba Diving team happens to get in trouble with Jeff Driskel. Or that second baseman who no one though would ever go pro happens to make it out of the farms leagues and wins a World Series within two years of leaving Gainesville, Fla.

All of these could happen and in some various scenario have happened before.

We saw a prime example of this during the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombings. I bet the photographer that took photos of that boxing competition thought to select all and delete after that season, too. Now his photos became one of the backstories to explaining such a horrific day in sports.

So as the season ends the scanning begins.

Florida / Texas A&M photos in my library.

Scanning through every game, tagging every location, best plays, importing rosters, tagging key players and writing descriptions.

I manage roughly 450,000 images in my photo library at any given time - sometimes I do delete photos once I am 100 percent sure no one would ever need an out of focus, over exposed, blurry photo of my shoe during a gymnastics meet.

All of these are broken down by year, publication, sport and date.

The system of folders and projects in my Aperture library.

I use Apple’s Aperture photo editing software to manage and backup every photo I have taken in my career.

It’s like a time machine for a photographer.

So many of us document what we do, from Instagramming our food to snapping an iPhone photo of that sunset that one time after dinner.

What’s nice is that our smartphones actually live up to their name in being smart. They embed GPS information so you can see your photos on a map. They keep time, dates and even the exposure. If you want to nerd out, just import some of your iPhone photos to Photoshop and view the metadata.

Well, our big DSLR cameras are pretty smart, too. Virtually every bit of information besides who is in the photo is recorded automatically by the camera as we shoot each photo.

But it still has to be managed. That’s where the human element comes in. Although, I feel like a cyborg by the end of each summer - combing through 40,000+ photos from the previous sports season and 80,000+ photos total each each year.

Even at the consumer level, some of these professional techniques may help you stay little more organized and not lose some memorable photos in the process.

So here are a few tips that keep our heads on straight and our editors happy.

1. Date everything: I said everything, not everyone! Each time you go shoot something, create a project with the date as the beginning of the name. For example: “2013-02-23 UF vs. Arkansas”
2. Create folders: Once you have the dates projects, organize them by sports. Most times this is intuitive. The Gators are probably only playing Arkansas in basketball on Feb. 23, 2013, but there could be something else going on the same time.
3. Rate your photos: Come up with a rating system. This will save you a ton of time when you want to go back. Often we are so concerned with deadlines during a football game, we shoot, we edit, we send off the photos and then forget about them. Well, sometime you’ll have to go back, and starring the photos 1,2,3,4 or 5 starts will help you determine what to keep.

Rating system of photos after the Florida / Texas A&M game in 2012.

I rate one stars as friends at the game, two stars for video and special projects (like focusing on one player for a feature story), three starts are good photos, four stars means I should send it out ASAP and five stars is a portfolio-worthy photo.

Just a few of these steps to help you manage your photos can make the difference between a very good Mother’s Day gift just days before when you realize that you should make a photo album and a disastrous night pecking at your computer to try and find that perfect photo from that time you cant remember at that place you have no idea about.

So as we recap each season and you view those best-of galleries and feature stories leading up to next season - remember, some of us have bloodshot eyes making lemonade out of our lemons that are photographs on the cutting room floor.

Have a great summer and happy shooting.

Sideline Report - Sometimes It Takes A Village

March Madness is long over, but it certainly doesn’t result in a Mai Tai on the beaches of Florida. Just like at the beginning of the spring, we have more events to cover with even less down time than the fall.

Spring football

One weekend in particular is always the behemoth of spring sports, and this year, it was due to the Gators losing in the Elite Eight, which made it somewhat workable.

The weekend of the Orange and Blue spring scrimmage (although this year it was more like an open practice with an overzealous house announcer) is always filled with as many events as the Athletic Association can schedule to accommodate fans.

But this year was special.

The NCAA Gymnastics NCAA Regionals were also being hosted in the O’Connell Center – alongside the Florida Relays, softball, lacrosse and tennis.

These are the moments where I thank the sports gods that Gator Bait Magazine switched print formats from weekly to monthly – giving us a little breathing room to edit before this issue goes to press.

I’m sure this would upset some basketball fans, but from a logistics standpoint, boy am I happy we didn’t have to figure out how to squeeze Final Four coverage into that weekend.

The success in documenting so many events in a weekend like this results in logistics. Like Billy Donovan's corny UPS commercial. Logistics is everything.

Christine Casey

Luckily, we now have a team of photographers helping us out – Christine Casey and Ryan Jones, both students and survivors of my classes at the UF College of Journalism and Communications.

So we frantically e-mailed, texted and talked, resulting in sending hundreds of photos between the three of us to make sure the games were covered.

Christine took track and tennis, I grabbed football and gymnastics and Ryan knocked out softball.

Sharing plans, equipment and embarrassing tan lines, we managed to get everything back to the designers for your enjoyment this month.

But a key component to making this work is packing. As I described in the January column, each sport requires its own equipment and style of shooting.

Jumping from tennis to track or football to gymnastics means more than your Clark Kent phone booth transformation. He only had to change clothes.

Good thing Christine has been playing tennis longer than I’ve been a photographer and Ryan can be thrown into virtually any shooting situation and produce a picture.

Ryan Jones

It’s a team that makes this type of coverage happen, and without the two of them, I’m not sure you’d have a complete photo package this month.

Like we go over in class at UF, preparing for every situation is key, and in this case, it wasn’t just getting a warm body at each event, it was trying to make pictures out of nothing.

In case you missed the Orange and Blue paint in Ben Hill Griffin Stadium on the day of the spring “game,” let me recap it for you. All you need to do is watch it dry.

Christine and Ryan were both at the spring “game,” and we were constantly giving each other that look that you would normally save for the time an in-law gives the slow train wreck of a wedding toast, but instead it was our job to make it sound (and look) good.

All while running on minimal sleep and sometimes forgetting what sport it is you’re going to next.

Gator Lacrosse

Again, this is where teamwork kicks in, and Christine and Ryan probably were doubting my sanity after the fourth or fifth drill into the practice.

I say this over and over again in my classes at UF. No single person becomes a great journalist, and this is the case for sports journalism. It takes a team filled with editors like Marty and a support system like Christine and Ryan to make a product worth buying.

This weekend was the perfect example. From planning and scheduling each shoot to going over which athletes to highlight, needing photos for the website and print magazine and making sure each bag is packed with the proper lenses for their respective sports. This is a job for the OCD-happy, farmer’s tan-wearing, sleep-deprived journalists whose work can tell a story, and bring you to as many places as possible.

Now we just need to schedule a shoot with a Mai Tai on a Florida beach and call it sports.

You can follow Christine and Ryan on Twitter for more of their work.

Shooting into the sun

Mom said to never look directly into the sun, right?

Wrong.

Sometimes the best photos are made shooting directly into the sun. In this case, Florida Lacrosse was up more than 10 points before the first half was over, and because of the time change, the sun was setting at 7:40 p.m. just around halftime.

Most would think that shooting directly into the sun would drastically underexpose your subject. This is also a myth. If properly exposed, you can get that deep orange glow of a late sun and your subject still exposed.

Here are a few examples from the game:

Nikon D3s (120mm, f/4, 1/800 sec, ISO500)

Nikon D800 (14mm, f/4.5, 1/160 sec, ISO50)

Once the light was lost after halftime it was a waiting game for twilight - arguably my favorite time to shoot.

While the action may not be the best, the sky proved to be worth shooting at 14mm.

Nikon D800 (14mm, f/2.8, 1/160, ISO800)

So the next time you find yourself shooting around sunset make sure to always look up - despite what mom says.

Ides of March

March Madness certainly earns its name even before Selection Sunday. College basketball proves itself time and time again each spring when the Cinderella team goes up against a champion and wins, or when an obscure group of five athletes comes out of nowhere and lands on the front page of SI.com.

We all remember the Gators’ two national championships vividly. We remember the “Year of the Gator” issue of Sports Illustrated. We remember the chest-beating screams of Joakim Noah. We remember the pictures of dunks, steals, fouls and net cutting.

The journey is madness.

And in recent years, the Gators have come close to that madness again.

Clearly, this year’s team is special. Despite a few unexpected losses, the Gators are primed and ready to go into the ides of March.

This means, we must prepare to go with them. Not just packing our bags and showing up, but stepping up our coverage.

For photographers, this means documenting a team that could make a significant dent in Gator history. Remote camera, warm ups, team practices, traveling and, of course, March Madness coverage.

It is a crapshoot trying to plan how far a team can go in March, and it always conflicts with every plan, or every shred of a social life, you thought you had in spring. But the reward, much like for the players and fans, is always worth it.

Photographing basketball in March is like taking a bowl game and multiplying it by eight. The crowds are better, the stakes are higher and the players show more on the court than they ever have at the sold-out home game.

And once you’re in, you’re in for the long haul. The NCAA requires that you cover every game in the tournament if you plan to be at the Final Four – meaning you can’t just wait it out and see if the Gators make it to Atlanta and then suddenly plan a trip.

So what do you bring to March Madness? Well, pretty much everything you’d bring to a regular-season game and then some.

We cover basketball with multiple cameras, from behind and under the basket to inches above the wooden court to those behemoth lenses you see at football games – all of these make a difference in how you see the game online and in print.

I’m a Nikon guy, as many of you know, and Nikon has some amazing glass (lenses) that allows us to cover the games in very special ways.

One piece of glass that makes your feel like you’re in the middle of a packed home crowd or in the midst of madness is the 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. The 14mm is an ultra-wide lens that is pretty much like a fisheye lens, but without the bowing (fisheye) look to the edges of the frame.

This lens makes you feel like you’re sitting on the court, under the basket or in the rafters of the O’Connell Center.

It has a unique purpose in not bringing the action close to you, like a longer 200mm or 400mm lens, but bringing you into the scene that we are covering. This lens makes for fantastic full-page spreads in the magazine and galleries online.

The heart of covering basketball is a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. With its wide aperture (f/2.8), which allows more light to get into the camera and gives you that nice blurry background causing your subject to really stand out, it gives you the versatility to cover almost anything on your side of the court. Long enough at 200mm to zoom to mid-court and short enough at 70mm to cover a layup or dunk, this lens is used for majority of what you see online and in the magazine.

Now when you want to get crazy (as I often do), you bring longer glass to cover the defensive game – especially when you have a guy like Patrick Young who likes to make dramatic blocks. You can’t be on both sides of the court at once. So why not bring the glass that allows you to be in two places at once?

A 400mm f/2.8 is what you often see on the sidelines at a Gator football game. It is the bread-and-butter lens of all field sports photography. 

But it also allows you to get some tack-sharp photos of details in basketball that most photographers don’t bother with because of the shear size and weight of this lens (roughly 10 pounds).

All of this complete with remote triggers to hang cameras under the basket and a slew of memory cards and your trusty MacBook Pro, and you are ready to dive into March.

Now, you just have to find the best way to pack all of this and get it safely to each venue. We’ll save that for another time.

So as you enjoy March Madness both online and in print, at the big game or at home on your couch – make sure you check out the galleries and take a look at all of what we do to bring you closer to the action and tell a complete story through photos.

I’ll be in the bottom corner of your television set.

Spring Into a Varied Approach

McKethan Stadium at the University of Florida

Now that we have hung up our shoulder pads, licked our wounds from the Cardinals and obsess over recruiting, we have a new season of competition to focus on – spring. While spring to many is about the smell of clay on a baseball diamond and the squeaking of shoes on a wooden court, it is also about an entirely different regimen for covering Gator sports.

Most think that fall is the busiest time of the year. If you count miles traveled, yes, it is. This past season I traveled over 5,900 miles (5,000 by car) to cover road games for the Gator football team. That is more than 85 hours on the road criss-crossing six states in the South.

Gator Football

Football is an interesting beast to tackle. You have 12 games to tell the story of a season. You have 48 quarters and roughly 36 hours of shooting players on the field. The limited access we get as the media off the field makes this task of visually telling a story daunting. I shoot between 30,000 and 35,000 photos every football season. Why so many? Well, in the age of digital photography you can hold that shutter down for a few extra clicks to make sure you have the perfect shot – or a few shots to work with in a sequence of a play.

All of this has to come together as my MacBook Pro is whirling through thousands of photos and crunching data to color correct, crop, render, export and upload hundreds of photos and gigabytes of video online each week.

So how can spring be any more difficult, especially when we don’t cover road games?

Well, just like any other workout, you can get into a pretty comfortable routine. You pack the same gear, you shoot from similar places on the field (but still try to get something a little different each time) and you know what you’re looking for in the game. This season, I chose to shoot with a 400mm and 600mm lens in the endzone and move around less. It paid off. Shooting with the longer glass allowed me to get clearer photos that were straight on as opposed to moving down the sidelines and shooting the plays at an angle.

So now that our spring sports have arrived, it is like taking your regular workout routine and switching to cross training. Throw your favorite lineman on a baseball mound and see how well his curveball reacts.

Gator Baseball

This will be my fifth spring shooting Gator sports, and, luckily, experience helps with this transition. But each year there is still a little re-training to remember just which way to react when there are two men on base and the ball is hit on the ground to left field. What do you shoot first?

Basketball is no different. Reading the plays in sports is vital to your success in telling a story, and sometimes, it takes a few missed shots and curse words mumbled behind your camera to get back in the game.

At a school like Florida, there are really two sports in the history of the campus – football and everything else. The interesting part about everything else is just how much fun it is to cover.

Year after year, I am approached by eager young photographers, much like myself when I was getting started, that ask me to take them along to a shoot. Almost always they ask to shoot football, and almost always I politely decline. The funny part about this awkward denial is that spring is the better season to learn how to shoot.

Gator Track and Field

While you can get pummeled on the sidelines in The Swamp from a play getting too close, more often than not the ball is being snapped and handed off 30 to 40 yards away.

In basketball you are less than 20 feet from the free throw line and a few inches away from the paint. You are constantly trying to keep your head on your shoulders in a baseball or softball photo shoot as a foul ball comes racing by. You might as well call lacrosse a contact sport with the not-so-soft rubber ball. And I could almost swear I have been close to getting a foot to my face while covering gymnastics.

Spring sports are some of the most exciting to shoot because you can get close to the action and have the freedom to try something different.

Football has become so routine that the most exciting part of your day could be going up to the top of the stands to take a few crowd shots and maybe shoot a few plays at a different angle – only if the team is winning by a huge margin.

Gator Gymnastics

As a visual journalist you have to bring people to places that might be exotic in location or subjects that may have never been seen in a certain way. These sports allow photographers to bring readers below ground level in a baseball dugout or on the end court of a Kentucky-Florida basketball game or eye level with the balance beam.

So next time someone is complaining about the lack of excitement because we still have months left until the 2013 football kickoff, ask them how exciting a shot clock can be with a tied game or what a bunt in the bottom of the ninth can do to a stadium filled with fans.

I would argue that the excitement of college sports for the fan and the photographer certainly lives on after The Swamp is silenced.