Journal

Last week I shot Takeover at Bucket Warehouse, the NBL1 and Kyrgios event in Mitchell. I got home with 900 photos and around an hour of video. By 5pm the next day I had 45 fully edited photos done, posted 20 of those to the feed, and the reel went up at 7pm the same day.

The shoot itself is the fun part. Sport is predictable enough now that I usually know where the next play is going to be, and trusting your reflexes after a couple of seasons is most of the job. The hard part is sitting at the desk the next morning, going through 900 thumbnails.

Most of the photos I cut weren't bad. They were just another version of something I'd already kept. I shot a burst, the second frame was sharper than the third, the third had a worse expression than the second, so you only keep one. Or the wide shot said less than the close, and the wide gets cut. Or I shot it in colour but the black and white was clearly stronger, so the colour gets killed.

You end up cutting around 855 photos and the people you delivered to never see them.

I think this is the part I underestimated when I started doing this. I thought the camera was the job. The camera is maybe 30% of the job. Picking which photos to send is 60. The other 10 is the edit on the ones that made it.

A 45 photo set isn't 45 random good photos. It's 45 photos that work in order. The first sets a tone. The second builds on it. By the twentieth, the night reads back. If two photos do the same thing, the second one goes.

20 of the 45 went on the feed because dropping 45 photos in a single post is unreadable. The reel went up two hours later. People who were at the night had something on their feed before they'd even unpacked their gear.

That's the part I actually love about this work. Not the shooting. The fact that I can shoot a night and have it live on Instagram by 5pm the next day.

This one is about the Michael Paynter shoot earlier this month. I came home with 1500 photos. It wasn't a fast-moving night. Paynter was solo, switching between guitar and piano, sat in one spot most of the time. But shooting a full live set in low light, you take a lot anyway. Expressions change between phrases. The lighting cue shifts every song. You don't know which version of a moment is going to land until you're back at the desk.

I edited 150 of them properly. Cut that down to 80 I was happy with. Sent him 40. I posted 15 of them as a collab with him.

Out of all 1500 there was one frame I was hoping to get before I even arrived at the venue. Wide. Negative space. Him centre stage in a big, mostly empty theatre, looking small. I held my breath when I took it. The next morning when I pulled it up in Resolve, I had to push almost a full stop of shadow into the floor without losing the warm spotlight on him. Took 20 minutes on one photo. Worth it.

If someone else had edited that frame, they wouldn't have known what the room felt like. The theatre was a specific kind of dark. The spotlight was warmer than it looked on the back of the camera. You can write that in edit notes, but it isn't the same as having been there.

That is why I do my own editing. Not because I think I'm better at colour than someone with ten years on me. I'm not. But I know the night. I know which frames matter and which ones I'd defend if they got cut.

Sometimes I think I should outsource it. I'd book more shoots. I'd be making more on paper. But the edit is honestly half the reason I'm into this. I sit at the desk the night of, or the morning after, with the show still in my head, watching the frame I held my breath for in camera come up on screen and start to look like what it actually felt like in the room.

That's why I'm doing it. Not for the cheque.