you may be asking, “why the blurry pic there, pro-fesh-unh-naull?”
that’s an excellent question. i shot for a bike event and the contract stipulates that i can’t upload or use any of the pics that i shot for 3 months. well, a blurry shot can’t be used for anything, so it doesn’t count. sometimes the camera just misses focus completely. as in the desired subject is completely out of focus. such is “auto focus” — at least on my fuji x-t3s. a person has to be deliberately patient and quick when half-pressing the shutter to allow it to acquire focus before actually pressing the shutter to capture the shot. occasionally, the camera will give a false positive on focus lock. it’s really hard to tell in the tiny viewfinder, so green and a beep mean go. only sometimes, not really. i’ve read posts galore about this feature/bug of fuji. but, i also had it on my canon cameras. i once saw a photographer with a nikon z9 capturing some action photography. they could bring the camera from their side, raise, aim, and pressure the shutter all within 1 second or so and the camera would nail the focus every time. it was pretty impressive. the only skill needed was to be able to compose the scene, but even then one could crop in post to improve the look or feel of the image. that’s a $7,000 system, so well beyond by budget and needs.
the blurry pic is there for eye candy and to illustrate that, sometimes, the shot just comes out not the way it was intended. at least if you are using a camera system that costs less than $7,000. and my system certainly does. i’m sure the nikon z9 misses focus sometimes. maybe. no system is perfect. so, you have to be quick and adapt on the fly. i’m overly awed when i think about action/sports photographers before auto focus. now that’s skill.
i drove 4 hours to the city of the event the night before. i had used google maps and street view to get a couple of locations along the route from which i could photograph the cyclists. the first location, roughly 5 miles from the start and up a steep hill, i knew would be good. it was simple and there wasn’t a ton of distractions such as signs, utility poles, wires, and vehicles. when i got to the second site, it was clear that it wasn’t going to work. too busy and going to be very hard to frame. so, i drove around looking for another location. that’s when i saw the corn field. it was perfect. the street wasn’t too busy, which meant i could stand in the middle of it, and there were no distractions other than the fence. and it could be blurred with a large aperture.
i then had to find a place to park and sleep in the car. photography doesn’t pay so well these days. some photography, done by big names for and of big names, pays pretty well. but, otherwise the world is saturated with photographs. cameras, and phones, have gotten so good that using them requires little to no skill. the only thing one really needs to know how to do is compose a shot. this job just wasn’t paying enough to cover a motel. a dirt road up a mountain to a dirt lot was the ticket.
i woke up before dawn the next morning. luckily it wasn’t too cold a night. i ate a few cold, stale donuts, drank some water, and was off to park and walk about 1/4 mile to my first location. it was a crisp morning. perfect for some bike photography. the riders began arriving and i started shooting. it came time to switch the battery. i got a fresh one on the ready, turned off the camera, dropped out the expended one, slid in the charged one, and turned the camera back on. i was greeted with the “choose your language” screen. seriously?!?! this is also a bug of some x-t3 bodies. i took the lens off the camera that reset itself and attached it to my other x-t3 body. shooting then re-commenced. when there was a lull in riders, i connected the freshly reset camera to my iphone and the fuji app. from there i was able to restore the camera settings to the way they were before the reset. i put the lens back on the body that i just restored and again continued shooting.
i shot for 2 hours at that location until the riders began just trickling through. i then ran back up the hill with all my gear and drove to the second location, quickly parked, jumped out, and ran over to start shooting as cyclists had already started arriving. my camera body reset itself at least once more during the afternoon. doing some reading, it seems, might appear, to happen when i switch batteries too quickly. someone posited that when they wait at least 4 seconds to install the fresh battery after removing the discharged one, they experienced no more resets. i have only once been able to replicate the reset at home. it pretty much always happens during a shoot. i have now purchased a battery grip that connects to the bottom of the camera. it holds two additional batteries which means that i now have 3 batteries installed in the camera. it also gives me a few extra controls that are perfectly placed for when the camera is oriented to shoot in portrait instead of landscape.
i shot for a total of 6 hours and came away with 10,100+ images. about 1,000 of those i did not deliver. of those, i’d say probably 200 or so were just complete misses (see above). the rest were just extra shots of a rider, not necessary as 10 frames per rider was sort of the target, had a wonky composition and just didn’t look good, or had some other issue that wasn’t related to focus. the in focus, but undelivered shots still cannot be used for 3 months.
i then had a 4 hour drive home where, immediately upon arrival, i had to import thousands of images from 4 sd cards, cull those bad shots out, do some light processing to boost shadows and raise exposure a bit to meet the creative brief of the client, export the final images, and then upload them to a google drive folder. that didn’t go well, because 25GB of photos was beyond the limit of my personal google drive capacity of 15GB and wouldn’t you know it, me uploading files to someone else’s folder they shared with me counts against my own storage space. google says this is the way the system is intended. that is not a joke or sarcasm. i had to purchase additional google drive space. additionally, google would spontaneously drop the upload which meant i had to babysit the thing all night long and into the next morning. our apartment has internet where i could not increase my upload speed. it was not an option, so i was stuck with a very crappy upload of 1 image every 1 to 2 seconds. you can imagine how long that took with about 9,100 images. then, add in all the disconnects and stalls and other issues.
at the end of the day, the client received a bunch of images and was extremely pleased.
the job certainly covered gas money there and back, but then i have to eat the sales tax because every state in the nation considers digital photographs tangible goods and this job was accepted as a flat rate. i had hoped that the client would send me a resale certificate relinquishing me from having to collect sales tax from them. i sent the blank certificate for them to fill out and return to me.
“thanks, but i don’t need that form.”
yeah, but i would do.
in the end, even though i get paid, photography is quite often more like a hobby that pays for itself. which is not a bad thing. i get some practice, have fun, and get paid a little for doing it.
now to find some big name that needs a portrait shot for big money.