I remember the film days too well and the manual focus!
Oh yes! When I first started on the job I had to go shoot a football game on my third or fourth day -- and I had never been to a high school football game in my life! I had been to college games -- quite a few, in fact -- but the high school I attended was too small to field a competitive team. The editor I was replacing was on hand to "ease" me into the job (and boy, could I tell you stories about that paranoid lunatic -- what a joke his help was!). He advised me that my Nikon's autofocus would never be able to keep up with the action on the field and that I needed to use the paper's old manual focus camera. I knew how to focus manually, but not in that situation. Still, I did as he advised -- for the first half of that first game. At the half, I went back to my car and changed to my camera in sheer frustration; I got much better photos and never touched the other cameras again. The 6006 was, IIRC, one of the first Nikons to have "predictive autofocus" -- if your subject was moving toward or away from the camera, it did a pretty good job of holding focus. I came into the job of managing editor almost completely green. I'd done a little production and paste-up (remember
that?) at another paper, and had done a little writing on my community college "paper," which was actually published on a more-or-less monthly schedule. I could write and knew enough about photography to get me by at first, but I'd never done either on any sort of real deadline. Honestly, I was thrown in over my head to take that job (especially considering I didn't live in that community and so didn't know everyone already the way some of the other writers did), but I learned a lot that I still use to this day, even though I'm not a journalist and definitely don't want to be one -- at least not a news reporter or a writer in general.
We share a printing plant with our sister paper and we have the earlier deadline which is midnight. We have a two person sports dept and usally the guy that shoots and writes and sometimes a news reporter will pick up a game and the rest we handle by call in from coaches. Going digital was a great boon for deadline sports photography.
We were unusual for such a small paper in that we had our own press on-site -- a Goss Community. We made a lot of our profits printing papers all week from some of the even smaller papers nearby. This was in Chipley, Florida -- the
Washington County news and our sister paper, the
Holmes County Times (now the
Holmes County Times-Advertiser. They no longer print on-site -- they're now owned by a larger company and are printed on the Panama City
News Herald's press. It makes for a
much better-looking paper; even back then, our press had a bad spot on one blanket that often reared its ugly head!
I can imagine what digital has meant for sports photography. We used a bulk loader to fill our cartridges with film -- I always had to remember to do that! I eventually got to the point where I shot 60 or so exposures for football games, once I learned what I could and couldn't do, and which players to watch -- and how much film I could review in the time I had on Monday! It helped that I developed a pretty good idea of which shots were winners and which weren't as I shot them.
SSB
