swim meet disaster

[egos4life]

Hello i think this is where this should go. Well last week we shot a swim meet finals... We are a new business and quickly learning the ropes. We did a time trials with 8 teams and did fairly well we learned from our mistakes and shot all the correct lanes. Then the photographer they had lined up for the finals flaked out and another team called us last minute and we said we would give it a shot. Later to find out there were 24 teams and 1200 kids 70 events 8 lanes. Over all we got some good pictures had over a 100 orders we missed 5 kids and shot the wrong lane 4 times overall didnt think it was that bad. We had no down deposit for us to shoot and promised nothing. A couple of the parents were made because we didnt get there kid. All we could say is sorry. Where did we go wrong? Or did we at all. The ones we missed were because we had 2 photographers and in some heats we had 3 kids and one got left out.

[steved110]

You learn from everything. Maybe the people who missed out could be sweetened up with a 'sorry' note and a voucher for next time?

Sounds like you did pretty well considering the constraints.

[Phil Light]

I'm impressed you did that well. In my opinion swimming is one of the most difficult/stressful sports to shoot. It almost requires a second person to assist each photographer in order to keep track of who needs to be shot, what lane they are in, who was shot, and then on top of that, it's not always easy to even get a decent shot of them since their face is buried in the water most of the time. Not to mention some of the events are over in less than 25 seconds.

[Darsk47]

I'm an 'official photographer' for a local team and I shoot many meets.

I recognize the kids on the team so luckily for me, keeping track of who's who is not usually an issue. But I do shoot others so here's my method of keeping track:

1. Heat sheets - get a copy. Two bucks at most meets, often free for the photographer.
2. Follow the meet closely, what event , what heat. Cross off as they're raced. Make sure you can always see the timing board.
3. When your subject is up, before the gun take a shot of the empty timing board. Virtually all boards have the event and heat number on the top of the board.
4. Next shot is of the starting block you're swimmer is on. Lane numbers are at the far end too, in case that's where you set up. A 50m (olympic size) pool has two sets of blocks.
5. Now you've recorded the event, heat, lane and you have a heat sheet to trace it back to the swimmer. Good confirmation is that the team name is on heat sheet, and usually also on swim cap.
6. Of course you could always circle their name on the heat sheet and take a picture of that.
7. It only messes up when a swimmer starts from the wrong blocks. They get DQ'd for that and then don't deserve pictures anyway. ;)

[egos4life]

thanks for all the info guys