This primate spends plenty of time in the digital darkroom, more than I spend at the actual events whether I am looking at the best 10% or 1%. I color grade everything and almost always make local adjustments -- I find color graded flower photos are hugely crowd pleasing and for sports a lot of student athletes have the beauty of youth but also really bad acne not just on their face but on their legs and for every event I develop a LUT which handles issues like that not too mention everything from neon-colored sports gear and green foliage that can be too saturated if not entirely out-of-gamut while still keeping the jersey colors recognizable.

My last 3 years of photography really started when I got a "free" inkjet printer and realized it would dry out if I didn't use it regularly and challenged myself to make a print every day and realized it couldn't just be anime girls from danbooru so that program was hungry for images and dragged me kicking and screaming into photography

https://www.behance.net/gallery/232344867/Life-is-Better-Wit...

and as much as people like to bitch about the ink mafia, the performance of digital inkjet printing for the price is off the chart, my materials cost for 13x19 prints is well under $2 a page.

All of this.

I shoot more film today than digital. I like the process more. The shots cost real $, so I'm more thoughtful about what I capture. The cameras[1] are mechanical art and feel good to use. I look forward to the delayed satisfaction due to off-site processing. The results might not be "pixel perfect" but photography rarely is... I prefer the slightly less perfect aesthetic - the grain, the slight miss on color, etc.

But, I also shoot Polaroid, so I might just be a hipster who lacks self-awareness. ;)

1 - Olympus 35DC, Olympus 35RD, and Canon Demi EE-17 for film. Olympus E-M5 and Pen E-P5 for mirrorless. Polaroid Go for instant.

I don't spend anytime post-processing or editing apart from occasional cropping. Film gives me a better baseline for that than digital does, at least for what I want and I just prefer the process. Digital encourages a workflow thats a lot more attached to post and being back at my computer rather than just out taking photos.

To be fair, film photography has itself always been, "Monkey with a trust fund on a typewriter." Even with those that are actually technically adept, the skill/luck balance is far less venerable than with actual artists like painters and sculptors and CG wranglers.

A medium-format Hasselblad or Fuji camera can get pretty close. I mean, my Hasselblad 503cx and Fuji 690 are my favorite cameras, and if I could justify spending the money, a digital back for the Blad would be pretty tempting. And for my 4x5s, it really depends a lot on the particulars of film and lenses. That's quite variable. And it's an entirely different way of working.

I still shoot primarily on DSLR. I don't know how a modern mirrorless compares, but for me shutter lag is the big killer when it comes to action shots.

I grew up shooting 35mm film and my first digital cameras were a shock with their significant shutter lag. To some extent I can "learn" the lag for a given camera and compensate somewhat for things that move regularly. For irregular motion (like sports) shutter lag is maddening.

Re: hopeless - I supposed you could use multi-shot burst on laggy cameras and pull the trigger early.

For me one realization was that a good portrait is a good sports photo. It is better still to show some action or make a photo that tells a story but you can sell pictures to the parents of a student athlete if you make their child look like a superstar.

The best purchase I made for indoor sports photography was DxO photolab which has a denoiser that means photos shot at ISO 6400 look perfect and can even make decent shots at 50000+ ISO

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114961647210448472

With basketball and a lot of sports there is the problem that if you follow the ball you get a lot of shots of people’s rear ends because that is how the geometry works so you have to fight that and look for the opportunities where things open up and you get a good ‘portrait’ and if you do that the action and story shots will happen. Headers in soccer are a special case, you realize people in sports are trained to do things a certain way so you know if the ball gets kicked high towards certain players they will try a header so you shoot a burst. For baseball you camp at a spot where you can see home plate and third base so you can show what is at stake, get the runner making a score, etc.

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114849463914827733

I started out with a Sony alpha 7ii which was deeply discounted, when it broke and I wanted to stay in the game I got a 7iv and sent out the 7ii out for repair, now I have a monster backpack and often go out with two cameras

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114866409940645564

But since the lid blew off in Gaza we have a clear bag policy at my Uni so I take just one camera to games. For indoor sports my weapon of choice is this lens

https://electronics.sony.com/imaging/lenses/all-e-mount/p/se...

but my favorite lens for walking about and outdoor events where I can get close is

https://tamron-americas.com/product/28-200mm-f-2-8-5-6-di-ii...

which I use for things like

https://www.yogile.com/trackapalooza-2025#12s

because the optical quality is great for a lens so versatile.

I think it's a dream if you know your aim at the onset is to get 2-5 good shots out of it, so you know you're going to quickly go through and delete almost every photo. Just scan the whole thing and see if there are any that are great.

If you're undisciplined and only delete the obviously bad ones, and end up with 1800 photos that you think you'll look through at some point, well then you have a pile of junk you're never going to look at again.

Sounds like a nightmare. My cameras gives me 10 exposures. I think about them carefully.