Continuing our sports photo project of the year, Armando and I went to Vancouver on Saturday to shoot a much anticipated soccer match of the Vancouver Whitecaps against the Seattle Sounders. Because we are located on the Island, an event like this requires full-day commitment.
Having made this kind of trip several times before, the logistics are almost routine at this point. Taking the 11 o’clock ferry from Swartz Bay to Tsawassen, we arrived at the BC Place a couple of hours before the start of the match – enough time for a stroll through the streets of Vancouver and a cup of macchiato at Cafe Artigiano by the Art Gallery for a taste of a big city after our sleepy Victoria.
Inside the stadium, we were greeted many familiar faces: the players (I have an illusion that we know each other, even though this is clearly a one-way relationship), the die-hard fans, the fellow photographers.
Shooting a game of this level is always incredibly exciting. Time flew, and the match was over almost too quickly. Armando stayed in Vancouver, and I took sky train and bus to catch a 9 o’clock ferry back to Victoria. I spent the 1.5-hour-long journey sorting through the 2,500 images on my laptop.
It turned out that Svetlana and Anya had an exciting day of their own and a very late nap (Anya did, anyway), so they were able to pick me up when I arrived on the Island.
, but it held up beautifully, along with the more rugged 
and the lenses (a 
and a 
).
on a Macbook Pro using a 
. Since I only wanted to select 3 or 4 best images, theoretically, there was more than enough time to select and post them in the remaining 6 minutes of the halftime. However, I found that changing my habitual workflow of culling, or selecting the best images, was not easy. My usual “shotgun” approach is to go through all images in the gallery mode and give one star rating to those that appear to be interesting and technically acceptable (sharp and reasonably exposed). The problem is that what I deem interesting results in about 10% of all images, which means that I would need to look through them again (and sometimes a third time) to further down-select to a set of not merely “interesting” but hopefully unique and generally the best. Clearly, this two- or three-stage process is not time efficient when only 3 images are needed to begin with. The only logical conclusion is the one needs to relax the quality of the selection process, i.e. accept the fact that the selected 3 images (which, by the way, must be determined in a single pass) might not be the best of the entire set. Basically, the timing of delivery of the images must take priority over the quality of the delivered photos. This is difficult to come to terms with, because from the artistic standpoint, we are emotionally attached to the photos we’ve just taken and intuitively want to show off the best of them. Here, the professional side of being a photographer must come into play. What helps me rationalize the process is that I know that the “best” images are still there, waiting in the Lightroom catalogue, which I will have other opportunities to review, hopefully, without the time pressure.
for that day, but I already knew that it was very unforgiving. One really needs to practice following the subject and anticipating the action, and even then, some missed shots are expected. It’s all worth it, though, as the shallow depth of field of this lens is unmistakeable and very appealing.
and a rather monstrous 
, all of which Armando was kind enough to lend me, along with about 10 years worth of his own experience. It was quite exciting to feel the adrenaline-charged atmosphere of the game and, as a photographer, to operate in a drastically different regime from my usual travel- and portrait-style of shooting (equipment-wise, I typically use a 
