One Thousand Fifty Six

[LuckySo-n-So]

That is the number of photos I took today at the LSU/Tulane football game.

I probably deleted at least 100 during the course of the day (which started at 8:00 am).

HOW do you professional photojournalists do it? I only shot maybe 25% of the actual game, with the rest of the photos being taken of the crowd, band, cheerleaders, etc.

I am dreading going through all of these photos. If my sole purpose was to shoot every play of the game, I can imagine that I would have well over two thousand photos, if not three or four.

Kudos to you Pros...I'm exhausted just thinking about it. :cheers:

ETA: I guess I shouldn't say I'm dreading it, because I've already seen quite a few "keepers." The joy of the "one good one" far outweighs the disappointment of the 30 bad ones.

 

[IgsEMT]

WOW.
Well, I'm not a PJ, but a wedding photo junky. And that is A LOT. Most I ever shot, was actually medium format film 956 frames during 12hrs. Most I ever had to process for a wedding (three crews) was 1200.
How do I do it? Like Nike says :thumbup:

 

[musicaleCA]

If you're a photojournalist, the goal isn't to get every play of the game. The goal is to get one, maybe two really solid shots to go be printed on charmin (though there is also demand for web quality images; the better the, er, better). In my case, this means hastening to get that good shot I need to bring back to my editor, review when there's downtime, and then once I know I have a few good ones to choose from, there's less pressure.

Work on your timing, and shoot less. Even for a day of shooting that's a lot of images. 1:30 is a nasty hit:miss ratio if you were mostly shooting the crowd.

Was it just one football game? I find I might shoot 400 images, tops, if I cover an entire hockey or football game, and that's shooting high-speed bursts, so a lot of those don't see the light of day.

 

[Derrel]

musicaleCA wrote, "If you're a photojournalist, the goal isn't to get every play of the game. The goal is to get one, maybe two really solid shots to go be printed on charmin (though there is also demand for web quality images; the better the, er, better)."

Uh,sorry, no. But that is entirely,entirely wrong. I understand you're a college student,but you are quite out of touch with the realities of real photojournalists at the professional level. The goal is to get good,usable shots on almost every single play, and every series. My local metro daily newspaper runs 3-4 shots, plus a web gallery of 10-15 shots every week, and virtually every scoring play--field goal,touchdown,safety, punt return for TD,etc, is captured by experienced staff photographers, many of whom have been working at the paper as long as 25 years. The quality of the images from today's professional sports shooters covering sports at the major college level is extremely high,and the images captured are capable of being printed quite large, as in double truck,on glossy magazine stock in Sports Illustrated. The "toilet paper" analogy might be true for your college paper, but the large metro daily newspapers obtain images of the current highest possible standards based on lenses,cameras,and photographers. On every series of plays.

Covering Pac-10 football, my metro daily and the other large daily each have two,or three, of their best and most highly-skilled photographers. What editors run is the "most important plays". If you fail to get the game-winning TD, you've failed. If the game winner is a last-second field goal and you don't have it captured, you've failed. The goal is clearly not to get one or two good shots....that's the kid-stuff level photojournalism..the goal is to cover the ENTIRE game. Professionally.

 

[LuckySo-n-So]

virtually every scoring play--field goal,touchdown,safety, punt return for TD,etc, is captured by experienced staff photographers

If you fail to get the game-winning TD, you've failed.

LSU scored six touchdowns last night. 3 were at the opposite end of the field, far out of reach of my 70-200 (I was shooting from the stands about 20-30 rows up). 1 was scored in the waning moments of the game when I was heading to my car. 1 was scored when I was under the stands waiting to take the field with the LSU Alumni Marching band (I'm a band geek as well as a late member of the A/V club--that really scores points with the ladies ).

So yeah, I was able to catch one touchdown, but totally botched it (also, it was scored on the opposite side of the field--same end zone, but I was on the west side and it was scored on the east side.)

I'm starting to get the hang of it, but still have a long way to go. Hell, I still somehow managed to inadvertantly switch my "program" wheel from Av to Tv or macro...LOL. Need to watch those fingers. I also forgot to change my iso before the game started, so I shot the whole game on iso 800 which was a bit too high.