Just a normal weekend

October 14, 2014  •  Leave a Comment

Weekends are great?? Right?!

When the Mon-Fri 9to5 crowd chat excitedly on Friday about the weekend and time-off, for myself - the excitement is of a different kind, sports are waking up from the mid-week hibernation in the UK and it's time to get some serious work done!!

Here is a little re-cap of a quite 'normal' weekend - which just happens to be this weekend gone by.

Friday : Off to done some Head-Shots and Action stuff in a basketball game in Leeds - having trundled along the English roads for enough years, I know that to be sure to get to Leeds by 4pm, I better start driving at 10am (for those who don't know - this journey SHOULD take about 3 hours). My motto is that it's always better to be 2 hours early than 5 minutes late at a job.

Once again the M42 and M1 were true to their Friday form - and the drive from Worcester to Leeds took me SIX hours, but - I got there on time.

Set-up my lights, I had forgotten my backdrop stand - but but of gaffer-tape and clamps on the walls and all was good! Photograph the players, then the game.. and back down the motorways to get some sleep. Smooth driving most of the way - apart from SatNav directing me to a road that was closed (Thanks TomTom!!). 

Arrive home around 1.45am - shower, bed !

Saturday : Alarm rings at 6.45am.. off to our local French bakery, baguette, serrano ham, pain au chocolat.. and then off to Loughborough University to cover the opening day of WBBL. Head shots..action shots and also a Men's BBL game to end the evening with.

Luckily for this day I had some help from a fellow photographer (Hvala !!) - long day at the University from around 9am until 9.30pm. And this is without a break in the games/head-shots. So my diet was mainly the baguette and serrano ham.. flushed down with coke and red bull. Who says you can't live healthy and have a busy work schedule ;-)

Back home and just make it there before midnight.. shower.. bed!

Sunday : Alarm once again at 6.45 - French bakery closed today, not good!! So just a quick bite to eat before heading out. Three WBBL games to cover and in between rushing to Birmingham City Ladies in Solihull (and once again help from a friend).

Set-up in Loughborough - yes, we had to change to different room/venue from Saturday :-) Go through the first team of head-shots and then down the M42 to Solihull. Cover the footy game there, edit game-gallery for the client and up the M42 to Loughborough to cover the last WBBL game of the weekend.

Studio gear nicely packed away - stuff into the car (it's still in the car today - Tuesday) and fight my way through Sunday traffic back home. Shower... bed...

Monday : Not going to wake-up early!! But once I do - it's time to look at about 5000 images on the computer. Time to get some serious image editing done, lots of head-shots, action shots.. now this is the part of Sports Photographers job that you don't see. We sit alone in our office/living room/bedroom and spend hours shifting through the images, archiving them, uploading them....

But !! It is a job I love, a job that will never make me rich in monetary values... but the people I meet, the games I cover.. it is something I love and am very fortunate to be able to call a 'job'.

During the weekend I spent about :

- 20 hours driving

- 18 hours sleeping (three nights)

- 24 hours photographing games

- 10 hours editing images (Monday)

My diet was :

- 1 baguette

- 8 slices of Serrano Ham

- 2 Pain Au Chocolat

- 3 'Grab Bags' of crisps

- 4 cans of Red Bull

- 6 litres of water

- 1 yoghurt

- 1 cheese burger

- 1 bowl of cereal

- 2 bottles of Coke

And that is all I ate from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening - yes, it is a healthy lifestyle !!!


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