All Day Softball Tourn. How To Keep Track Of Photos!

[ColeSales]

I'm shooting a 12 hour softball tournament tomorow, there are 38 teams registered and I've got a team og photographers ready for action photography, and team, and candid photos.


How do I keep track to the teams that were taking pictures of..? I'm thinking about making up notecards for each team and snapping a picture of the notecard before we take pictures of each team.

Has anyone else ever done something like this...? I'm open to suggestions.

[huntersdad]

First thought is each photog, or group, shoots one game with candids, then turns them in and moves to the next game.

Notecard would work well too.

[JacobPhoto]

Will you have an on-site editor? and runners?

1 person should be manning a computer and sorting through the images. Each game gets its' own folder. Any photographer switching games / fields will drop the cards off with the runner or editor, who makes a new folder for that game and puts everything there. Images are then backed up onto multiple HD's before the card is returned to the photographer.

[bigVinnie]

Workflow is everything.

First and easiest, separate memory card for each team.

Go get some 6x9 envelopes at office depot, make sure they don't have a metal clasp. Do up a blank form for team and player info and PRINT IT ON THE ENVELOPE. Shoot the team, drop in the card.

[banquetbear]

...the day before the event is really the worst time to be figuring things like this out. In the future you should have you workflow all planned out even before you send in your proposal for business: deciding stuff like this the day before the event is a recipie for disaster. Good luck.

[NickJushchyshyn]

Agreed, workflow is everything.
We provide tournament photography in the Philadelphia region for everything from week-long national level events through to weekend, or one-day regional and local tournaments. Regardless of the scale, having a preplanned approach for quickly processing the photos is critical, since we typically have around 1000 photos, per photographer, per hour.

Our primary workflow is to assign Team-ID numbers to every team, and Game-ID numbers to every game (these mean nothing to the players or their families, but are gold for us). We can use these IDs to pre-build all our galleries and indexes as needed.

Before the event, we print out a mailing label per game (using those Avery sheets with 30 labels per sheet). Each label has the Game ID, Game Time, Field Location, Assigned Photographer, Team IDs and Full Team Names. These are placed on little "change envelopes" you can get at office supply stores (little paper envelopes that are a little bigger than the stickers, but perfect for holding 1-2 memory cards).

Photographers are issued a stack of these envelopes. Read the time/location of their assigned game, make their way to the game, pop a fresh card into their camera and shoot a photo of the envelope as a "slate" at the start of the card. Once their shooting is done, card goes in the envelope. Repeat as needed for all the assigned games for the day.

Then, either on-site or after the event, the cards can be read in, using the information on the envelopes to tag all the ingested photos with key info as their read in. This is far easier and faster than sorting through photos after they have already been ingested into storage.

Hope this helps.

[110yd]

Originally Posted by ColeSales

I'm shooting a 12 hour softball tournament tomorow, there are 38 teams registered and I've got a team og photographers ready for action photography, and team, and candid photos.


How do I keep track to the teams that were taking pictures of..? I'm thinking about making up notecards for each team and snapping a picture of the notecard before we take pictures of each team.

Has anyone else ever done something like this...? I'm open to suggestions.

My 2 cent answer would be to ask each team coach for a roster. If you can get the team roster with the names and numbers for each player and team name, you should be able to put together a template. I would take a photo of the roster if there was not a hard copy available from the coach.

I would try to come up with a "Quick template" for the shots that I would be handing over at the end of the event. (Team Photo/Individual/Action shots/Final score of the game) The purpose of the template would be to have some consistency across all the team photos.

Hope this helps,

110yd

[PhotosGuy]

So... how did it work out for you?

Originally Posted by 110yd

My 2 cent answer would be to ask each team coach for a roster. If you can get the team roster with the names and numbers for each player and team name, you should be able to put together a template. I would take a photo of the roster if there was not a hard copy available from the coach.

38 teams? I would have tried to get all the rosters from the organizer first. And the first shot of any game would be of the rosters with a note on it of that teams colors.

[ColeSales]

It was a very long day, the notecards worked pretty well...Considering we had some teams not show up that was a easy fix with the notecards.