Sports photography question

[steve B]

The guy I knew just worked for the place he got his cameras and repairs and dropped off the bulk film for developing.

Apparently the photographer didn't even have the raw film cut into 3 shot strips like any of us would get, but just got back a bunch of 3000 shot rolls of negatives. Always rush processed, and taken to the globe where he and the globe people would unroll it and look for specific things based on his notes. Once they found the at bat or play they wanted they'd look at the sequence to see if there was a really good one - The ones popular at the time would show the ball just leaving the bat, or just geting there. Once they found a likely segment they'd cut that bit out and have a few small B+W prints run in house. The one they picked would go to the sports dept for editing, and the rest------I don't have any idea what he did with them.

I think my friend said the real important stuff never even went to the lab, but was developed in house by the paper.

I've never heard of anyone else working that way, It's very hard on the equipment and probably on the budget too. My friend never did tell me who it was, just said to pay attention to the photo credits and see who had the most.

The flip side was a photographer I worked for for about a month who would spend a bunch of time setting up a picture then doing some post processing to make it perfect. I spent an entire two days helping him get 4 pictures of his thunderbird ready to send to one of those bargain hunter type magazines. Wax the car, set it up in the driveway just so, wait till the light is "right" 4 clicks over maybe a minute and a half. Then developed. Next day, cropping and printing with a contrast filter to get it looking really good. The contrast had to be bumped up because the cheap weekly want ad always washed out the image. I learned a ton of stuff in a really short time. The other jobs weren't as fun, I spent most of the next week sorting 4 file cabinets of camera gear by how broken it was.

Steve B