So long story short I couldn’t play fall sports this year from an injury over the summer and I’ve been into photography for a while. I know settings wise how to capture sports pictures that’s not my issue, my issue is like the amount of pictures I should walk away with from each event. I’m currently shooting for my schools girls VB team and guys soccer team because they made sectionals. For the girls games I’m coming home with about 500-600 unedited raw pictures, and I end up with any where from 50-80 finished pictures, and I complete them in about 4-5 days. For the guys soccer games I came home from the sectional final which we won with 3500 raw pictures and I’m currently weeding through them, and I’m gonna edit them in the next week-2 weeks. Is this enough pictures, is it too much, and what’s normally a good time frame to promise coaches and the athletic director? I kinda want to turn this into a side hustle and have a paid gig after highschool because I’m going to college close to my highschool and I don’t really have any one to guide me. Hypothetically if I were to approach the school or coaches to set a rate what is reasonable to charge? Any advice is truly appreciated.
I should also add that I’m just spamming the hell out of high speed burst, not trying to line up 2000 different shots
Cull, cull then cull some more. I shoot fire dancers a lot, and when I’ve got a few thousand photos to go though I will filter light room to only unflagged photos, then press X to reject and P to pick. Just bang it out: if the position isn’t great or there is something clearly technically wrong, just press X and don’t look back. If you realize nothing interesting happened in a set of burst shots, just select them all, hit X and don’t look back.
Speed comes with practice and recognizing the stories that you want quickly. Then that will carry over to your shooting: you’ll know where to look on the field and where the stories are likely to show up so you’ll not take as many bad pictures.
Also, especially as another student, be a little careful about unflattering stories: a near miss is an amazing story that people love to see, but the person who missed it may not be happy about having their failure frozen in time and shared around. If you’re shooting the same people they’ll get to know you and perceived insults stick in people’s minds a lot longer than complements.