So the miles rack up and the EUROs plod on. After last night’s frantic battle to see who could be less inspiring to shoot between France and Romania in Zurich, I’m making my way back down to Lugano to shoot fans watching tonight’s match at an outdoor arena. As the thunder clouds rumble outside my hotel room, I’m not overly confident.

Anyhow, following Mute’s comment on another post that the was interested in the “behind-the-scenes” side of the job, I thought I’d share how the system works when shooting sport for an international agency. The reason I stress the “international agency” part is not a lame attempt at bigging my job up but more to show the difference in speed that is necessary when thinking for a global market. As someone once told me, the deadline for print is always minutes away SOMEWHERE in the world so it’s always worth getting your shots out fast..

Having previously only shot football in the UK where it’s just a case of wandering up a few hours early and shooting the match, the organisation involved in international championships such as these are a totally different thing.

Firstly, the whole area around the stadium is closed to traffic hours before the match begins so pre-allocated parking/transport passes are issued and you’re generally expected to report to the venue around 4 hours before the match starts. On arrival, I have to wear one of the branded bibs and my personal pitch pass that displays my allocated position. In regular matches, it’s just a case of arriving early and putting a monopod down to mark your spot but here, my seat will be waiting for me along with a power socket and a LAN cable.

First job is to shoot the fans and any interesting aspect to the event that makes it different. New venue? Unexpected team playing? Die-hard fans in full team colours? This should be considered from the moment you get near the stadium so I always make sure I have a camera ready to shoot any fans on interest who are loitering with intent to support on the streets outside.

When it comes to editing, captioning and sending the pictures, this is where the main difference appears; instead of performing the tricky skill of balancing a 400mm lens on a monopod, a 200mm around my neck and a computer on my lap as I frantically choose, crop, edit, caption and send the images back to the picture desk, I now have to shoot small bursts of maybe 2 minutes of action, scroll the images on the back of the camera, lock two or three that I like and delete ALL the rest. Then the card is slotted into my reader where the images are automatically ripped, identified and sent straight to Paris where someone else will choose, edit, caption and release the images that they want. Yikes. This goes against everything that the vast majority of people reading this will know or be used to (including me) The feeling of having to decide there and then what pictures work from a 2″ screen before sending the images off into the ether, hoping that someone a few hundred miles away has “seen” the same thing in the image that you have is a hard one to get used to.

The other new development for me is using remote cameras behind the goal. Anyone who watches football may have seen all the cameras on the floor behind the net but not realised that they are triggered by either a foot switch that you fire whenever you think there may be a goal or a transmitter from another camera that simultaneously fires the goal camera whenever you take a picture. This results in some unique style of tap-dancing whenever there’s any action near your goal as you quickly change from your long lens camera to your shorter range, swing the long lens to your side so you aren’t blocking other photographers and watch for the chance to press your foot switch. Craziness. Thankfully, here at EURO2008, all of the images from the camera behind the net are also transmitted directly to Paris without having to take the card out so someone else has to wade through a card full of shots of sky with no action to find one worthwhile..

After the match, there’s a quick scan of the terraces near you for celebrating/sobbing fan reaction pictures then pack it all up and begin the long walk back to the car..

Couldn’t have put it better myself..