Photoshoot season is here

Over 50 teams, one photographer and thousands of kilometres of Finnish road ahead..

Another pre-season is upon me and it is time to head with the gear on the road and shoot the promo/profile pictures of over 50 Finnish Baseball (Pesäpallo) teams.

Saturday morning was the first shoot – and hopefully the last teams will be done by 28th of May (one can always dream 😉 ).

Somehow the first photoshoot for a while is little stressful, to begin with.

You ask yourself ‘do I have all the gear with me’ ‘do all the lights still work’ ‘did I use this or that last year’ … so many variables and stuff. But then again, once you get the studio set up on location and get ready for the first players to come, then I am back at the comfort zone and it all goes back to the routine.

Start of the marathon tour was in Hamina – with both women’s and men’s teams to cover in the morning. All together about 35-40 persons to shoot – and with this sport, there is a lot of time that goes to when the player has to change their equipment – as I take the usual ‘mugshots’ without any gear.. then depending on the outfield position of the player it is helmet and glove, or just glove. And then after that they swap the glove to the bat.

On average I get maybe 5-9 minutes per player – but from that, the gear change and moving from backdrop (between white and black) to another.. the actual time to photograph might be closer to 3-4 minutes. And I have a set or target of getting about 30-40 different poses per player. So that does keep on on their toes and no time to stop and chat to the players, which would be great to do – as it makes the photoshoot that little bit more relaxing. Photoshoot days are NOT the favourite day for some of the players.. but I do try to make them nice and relaxed – still knowing that if I get at least ONE photo that a player is personally happy with.. than it is a job well done 😉

This year I am trying to take the tour nice and easy, so took two night at a ‘matkaparkki/camping’ around halfway between home and Hamina – so it was on to the road at 6.45am on Saturday morning, 8.30 setting up on location – photoshoot time 9.50-14.30, pack everything and get equipment back to the car, then another drive back to the camping through a late winter blizzard. Then from 16.40 until about 21.00 – it was editing around 3000 photos and uploading them to the website archives for teams/league to use.

On the editing front – I think my MacBook Pro M1 is probably a little SLOWER than my old 2017 MacBook Pro, the specs on the new on should be better. But somehow the RAW editing (Photoshop) just feels a little slower. But – four hours for editing two teams photos and getting them tagged with players names, and have them all uploaded – that’s pretty OK for me.

OH – I did manage to have a salmon soup for dinner while editing 😉

Also while the edit and tagging was going – I did have, first, some basketball games streaming on my mobile, and then also some Pesäpallo indoor tournament.. guess I could still have had something else on, on the iPad.

Evening ended with relaxing in the camper and watching ‘Enemy of the State’ on the TV while wrapped nicely under a warm blanket.