Photography is an never ending evolution towards a constantly changing goal. One day, I may take the best photo I’ve ever taken and then the next day, will already by trying to improve on it. This is how we become better.
My weightlifting photography has come a long way since I first started, and not just in skill but in gear as well. It is highly likely that the two go hand-in-hand. As my kit continues to evolve, the limitations are expanded and therefore my photo quality and consistency will too.
The first national meet I photographed was the 2015 USAW Nationals in Houston, TX. Team 813 Barbell was going with a couple support members, and I asked if there was room for one more as team media. There was room, so I bought a ticket and packed my bags. It was a great experience overall, and I’ll detail the whole trip in a later blog post, as I would like to do with all the meets I have been to and recorded.
To get a good understanding of what is to come with my weightlifting photography, it is important to know where it came from.
THE BEGINNING
In the beginning, there was Canon. Two Canons. Their names were ‘5D Mark II’ and ‘7D’. These Canons had lenses, who were dubbed ’24-70 f.28′, ’70-200 f2.8 Mark II’, and ’35mm f1.4L’. In these beginning times, zoom lenses and nearly outdated camera bodies was the best I had, and they did well. Their limitations included a maximum aperture opening of f2.8, which I didn’t think was low enough at the time because I couldn’t run an ISO value over 6400 on either camera. This caused me to have to run a shutter speed of 1/320 which just plain old wasn’t fast enough to freeze motion. There was a lot of noise and motion blur in those early photos, but with good shot timing and a steady hand, I could manage to nab a shot inbetween the transition parts of the lifts. With the 7D only shooting 7fps, and the 5D2 shooting a whopping 4 frames per second, I would run the 7D on continuous shutter and then snipe my 5D2 shots. the 7D ran the 24-70 on a remote and I handheld the 5D2 shooting both at the same time.
This proved to be mighty taxing on my upper body, lifting the massive camera and lens combo for every single lift. Only shot one competition for LiftingLife like that, and I think I ordered a monopod after the first day of the 2015 University Nationals, even though I knew it wouldn’t arrive until the meet was over. At the next meet, however, I used the monopod and never looked back! What a relief. Is it ironic that I now am back to lifting the big heavy lens every lift again? I still use the monopod, but for a different camera. We’ll get to the current setup later, as well as what is to come.
PHASE TWO
After my new found joy with the monopod, and still using the same two cameras, it was decided that having two cameras in the same spot looked a little redundant. The current remote was a wired one, and the kind that attached directly to the camera with no ability to extend the cable. This spurred me to find a wireless solution, and what seemed simple proved to not be.
Not all wireless remotes are created equal, in the sense that holding down the trigger button does not mean your 7fps camera will take 7 frames per second. Due to limitations with the vast majority of wireless triggers, I could only click off 3-4fps at best with the four different brands I tried out, one after the other. This was getting expensive. Then I found a Netherland-made wireless trigger and control system that looked promising. The description didn’t say it outright, but in online reviews it looked like it could handle many frames per second in burst mode. I remember many nights with my hands in the air asking ‘why is this so f’ing hard to accomplish’!! Finally, it looked like a savior was within reach.
$92 dollars later, the Hahnel Giga-Pro system arrived in the mail and it worked. FINALLY something that worked and would let me do the full frame-rate of the camera.
Well, almost.
This remote had something none of the other remotes had and that was 3-shot burst mode. All the other units tested only had single shot mode, meaning if you held the button down it would only take one photo. With this Hahnel unit, I could hold the button down and it would take three photos in a burst as fast as the camera could take them! With a little practice, I could do continuous shooting by accurately timing my button presses. This technique was practiced until perfected before the next weightlifting meet, and it was a big one: the 2016 USA Weightlifting National Championships and Olympic Trials held in Salt Lake City, UT.
IT WORKED
In the first outing of the side-angle remote-controlled shot, I framed up the Canon 7D and 24-70mm lens set at 24mm at about the 2/3 mark from the rear of the platform, and angled it in slightly to properly frame the lift, allowing for forward and back movement of the lifter, and still having a good shot. These photos can be viewed here: https://lifting.life/competitions/22
It should be noted that the generation of cameras I was using worked best with plenty of light. Neither had high ISO ranges, and even though I would consider them low these days, the highest ISO setting was plenty noisy and required a lot of post-processing in Adobe Lightroom to clean them up. I always shoot in .cr2 (raw) though, which allowed me to still keep a lot of details.
It should ALSO be noted that this was the first meet with my new laptop, the Dell XPS 15 9550, complete with 1TB SSD, Windows 10, 16GB ram, Intel i7-6700 chip, and an amazing 15″ 4k display (seriously). Finally I could edit and process on my own, on site, and upload. This was a huge step, and taken at the right time.
At the competition, they went through all the normal sessions first, and saved the Olympic Trials for the final sessions of the final day. This was every top weightlifter in the country, in two sessions (male and female), all happening on one platform right there in front of me. NBC owns all the rights to anything related to the Olympics, and was briefing all the other media personnel on what they can and can’t do with the photos. They briefed everyone except me because when asked who I was shooting for, I replied “I’m with LiftingLife and the primary photographer for this event under USA Weightlifting.” She said ‘OK’ and moved on to the next.
To say this didn’t make me realize the weight on my shoulders would be a huge understatement. Immediately my mind started racing on what could go wrong and how would I fix it. One of those things was the remote camera and its wireless trigger system. What would I do if it broke? I didn’t have a spare, they are expensive! What if the battery died? I could replace the transmitter battery in under a minute with the little screw that held the cover on, but the receiver used a button battery and I had no spare for that either, and it was the third day of shooting! All I could do was cross my fingers on that one, and keep the unit powered off when not in use.
The batteries didn’t die. Nothing broke or quit. The high-pressure sessions went without a hitch, and I took some of my all time favorite photos. This one comes to mind, as it was widely posted: https://lifting.life/photos/555349
Even though it isn’t super sharp and clear, it’s as good as it gets with a 7D and 24-70 in those conditions. It’s the attitude of the photo that I like. But, I digress. It was a highly successful meet!
TRIGGER FAILURE
Remember how I was worried about the button battery in the receiver? Well, it quit at the next meet. I hooked up my old wired remote, put it as far as the cable would go, and pressed the trigger housing against my monopod to make it all easier to hold. This wasn’t a big deal, but at this meet I was renting a Canon 1DX to use as the main platform body, and had it paired with an 85mm f1.2L lens. This is still the combo I use today, over a year later, because the images produced with that lens and that body have a very unique look. The old 5D2 was paired with the 70-200 and 1.4x extender to reach in super close on the chalk bowl and walk-up, and pulled off some great shots. Eventually I grew tired of the MacGuyver fix-it setup with the wired remote and put the 7D away so I could focus more on the other two cameras. This is what spurred me to the next evolution.
JOY IN A JOYSTICK
I didn’t want to deal with batteries and frame rate limitations anymore. I didn’t want to deal with manufactured remotes and their short cable lengths anymore. I didn’t want to deal with the fatigue of pressing this tiny button in an awkward position anymore. What was I to do? Why, what I always do… make my own!
While looking at what other people created on their own for remote triggers, I learned that the trigger itself does not send any signal to the camera to make it fire. All that is involved is closing a circuit. After bridging some pins in the 3-pin port for the trigger, I saw how easy it would be to make a custom trigger (in theory). I quickly took apart a long guitar cable, sloppily hooked it up to the camera with some clips and some careful positioning, and tested to see if i could trip the camera through 25ft of cable. It worked! I sat there for a good 20 minutes firing off pictures of nothing, just happy that it worked.
The next step was to make a button that would serve as the actual trigger. I wanted something ergonomic, and didn’t have to look far. Four feet to my left, under the computer desk, was a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro joystick that I used to use for flight simulators. Not having played one in a long time, I decided I was going to take it apart and use the awesome trigger on it as the remote button.
After taking it all apart and separating the joystick from the base, I then began to open the joystick itself and found the trigger mechanism. it didn’t take long to figure out which contact points on the circuit board were the ones that closed the circuit, and I began making wires to solder onto the points and travel to the bottom of the joystick. I then took apart a very old guitar amplifier to use the female 1/4 mono jack and carefully melt the inner plastic of the joystick to make it fit securely. After all the wires were connected and everything was positioned correctly, the joystick was closed back up and ready for testing.
With a 1/4 mono cable plugged into the joystick, and the other end hap-hazardly connected to the terminal on the camera, I clicked the trigger and instantly fired off a series of shots. Success!!!! And zero delay! Tactile feedback! It was everything I ever wanted in a remote trigger. After refining the connections and cabling, I can now put the remote camera anywhere I like and the trigger setup is very compact and portable. I made this over a year ago, and have shot 6 competitions with it since the build and it still works perfectly. It is gaff-taped to my monopod, and my hands work in unison to conservatively shoot both cameras at the same time. The setup still gets funny looks and stuttered questions, but it works! This is what helped lead to the next evolution of the Kitties ‘n Kilos setup.
THE CURRENT DILEMMA
Shooting with three cameras on one platform is fun. It keeps me on my toes, and I’m able to get three completely different shots, each one telling a different story with every photo. The drawback is that it takes 2-3 hours to process and prepare a session for uploading to lifting.life, and with the previous version of the uploader it would take another hour or two to upload. We strive to get the photos up as soon as possible and aim for same-day uploads. I had gotten my workflow so optimized that I was starting to keep up with the processing and uploading, and was able to have almost all of one day’s sessions uploaded by the next morning. The problem was that if anything, and I mean any tiny thing, went wrong or slowed me down, the whole fragile system would slow down and I’d be far behind.
Some examples of problems: computer got super hot, and ran slower because of it. Took forever to process photos. Fix: close the lid and let it sit upside down for more air flow.
Started talking to someone during an intermission, and began loading a memory card a few minutes later than planned. Caused the transfer time to run past the start of the next session. Fix: Keep tunnel vision and don’t mingle when in a time crunch.
USAW meet software crashes so much that they move to 5 minute breaks, and there won’t be enough time to transfer cards. Fix: load all files at the end of the session and use backup cards while the others transfer.
Card reader is faulty and only transferring at half speed, but didn’t identify it as the problem until all other probable problems were eliminated. Fix: use the spare card reader.
Shooting with a partner who doesn’t have a laptop, have to manage files from 5 cameras across 2 platforms. Fix: Bring a second laptop, if available.
Start an upload to be completely caught up with two days of weightlifting at 2AM. Check it the next morning after only getting 3 hours of sleep, it is running fine. Then there is about 30 minutes left on the upload and about 45 minutes until the day starts, and Windows does an automatic update which killed all the uploads and left them incomplete. Fix: none, nothing you can do there except curse Bill Gates and Windows 10 automatic updates.
That’s a snippet of what can throw a very delicate workflow system into a perpetual lag that can only be recovered from by staying up late and not getting much, if any, sleep. Bring on the energy drinks. These problems, and the variation of photo quality and standards from platform to platform, are what leads us (finally) to the main part of this blog post.
I had the idea to use the ethernet port on my Canon 1DX, connect it to an access point, and have the files automatically send from the camera, as they’re taken, to a folder via FTP connection. Only problem was how in the heck do you do that?? I spend weeks trying and trying and unfortunately never got it to work, which was a good thing now that I think about it. Without that failure, I never would have come up with the solution and grand scheme to do the same process, but with many cameras at once.
THE YOUTHS ARE THE FUTURE
What a fitting time and place to test out the new system. Before I get into that, a quick look at the numbers for the 2017 Youth National Championships.
-3 days
-4 platforms
-801 lifters
-60 total sessions (120 albums on LiftingLife)
-7 LiftingLife photographers
-The official rollout of the LiftingLife VIP program (personal photographer)
-hopefully 1 dedicated internet connection for us
You can see what kind of problems might arise with those numbers. We did too, and to help standardize the LiftingLife sequence shot I came up with a plan to remotely control 4 cameras, 1 per platform, have them all immediately send their files, auto-import to Lightrooom which would then apply a specific preset, aut0-export, and then auto-upload to the correct album on lifting.life.
I had gotten none of those things to work before, and half of them were simply theories that I figured I’d research to death and make work. Control 4 cameras at once? Not with EOS Utility, which only lets you run one instance with one camera. Four cameras? I don’t have four cameras. Auto-import to Lightroom? Only heard about that, never tried it. Auto-apply a preset? Just a guess. Auto-export? Lightroom does not support this. Auto-upload? A dream, a hope that we could write a program to do that.
All of these problems needed to be solved, and be implemented for Youths which was only 6 weeks away. As of this writing, it’s two weeks away.
Instead of making small attempts at all the problems at once, I decided to pick one and work it until it was solved, then start to piece everything together. This started with software: the auto import and export.
Lightroom can auto-import by monitoring a folder. If any files are added to that folder, it will pick them up, as long as they meet certain criteria, and import them. And that’s it, the file stops there and that isn’t enough. After many hours of googling and reading, I came across Jeffrey Freidl’s auto-process plugin. Lightroom may be slow and clunky, but it does allow 3rd party plugins. After installing this free plugin, I could control what folder was monitored, how often it was scanned, how long a file had to have been written to be imported, what collection to import the files to, what preset to apply, and what collection to export them to. All of this means that I can now auto import and export, with a preset applied. After some quick preliminary tests, it worked. Win.
To get the files from one camera to instantly transfer to the computer when taken was an easy process. Tethering the camera via USB and using EOS Utility 3 (free from Canon), I could configure it all to have the files immediately sent from the camera to a specified folder on the computer. This worked great, and I got it to work with Lightroom’s plugin as well for processing. The only problem was that this only worked for one camera at a time. Once again, after hours of searching and researching, I came across a little program called “DSLR Remote Pro Multi-Camera” from Breeze Systems. They have a 14 day free trial with the full software and could connect up to four cameras on the trial software. The full version can manage over one-hundred cameras at once! This is the kind of software you would use to do some Matrix style wrap-around shots (which would look so cool with weightlifting… maybe one day I’ll do this…). At first glance, I knew this was my kind of software. I like have a zillion options and menus, makes me feel like I’m operating the space shuttle. This presented a learning curve, since it wasn’t “what do I want to do?”, it was “what am I doing?”. After a couple days I had the software figured out and was shooting with all three of my cameras at once, all with completely unique filenames of my choosing, and going to a folder of my choosing. Win.
After a bit of explaining and planning, we decided that an auto-uploader isn’t necessary for the meet. We also decided to go with this system and use it on two platforms instead of four. That solves my lack-of-four-identical-setups problem. Win. With the ability to name an incoming photo anything we wanted to, we decided it would be easiest to have the filename start with the album number it would be uploaded to, and then would be uploaded into an upload folder that would place the files into the correct albums based on that file name. For example, if the Female 11-13yo 34kg B Session Snatch album was number 1227, I would set the filename for those shots to be imported into the computer as “1127-12345.jpg”. This way, once the snatch or clean & jerk portions are done, I can drag all those files into the uploader and the site would sort them out. This will require a bit of planning and accurate execution on our part, but that is something we can control and triple-check for accuracy. I’m not worried about that. Now I’ll be able to quickly drag and drop without worrying about multiple tabs for multiple albums. Win.
So where are we in the process now? I can shoot photos and have them immediately sent to my laptop for auto processing, and then can quickly drag and drop for the upload. Thus far, we are on-track to getting photos up very very quickly.
The next test was to see how well Lightroom could keep up with the photo processing. I set up two high-fps cameras and would be capable of taking 22 photos a second. Two YouTube windows were opened and placed side-by-side to simulate two sessions going on at once. I chose two random sessions from Frank Rothwell’s awesome YouTube page. Shout out to him… he does a great job getting a lot of content on the web!
Each session had 7 lifters, and both ran the same amount of time at 1:10:00 each. Everything was ready to go, so I hit play on both videos and started shooting both cameras as if they were each shooting a platform. For an entire hour. At home. It was so boring 🙂 But the test proved one thing: Lightroom is too slow to process 3,500 photos, even when processing them as they came in. After the sessions ended and the photos stopped, I started my timer to see how long it would take to process all the photos (apply the preset and export). At the 90 minute mark, it was only halfway through the set so I shut that down and ruled it a successful test that proved Lightroom was too slow for my intentions, and will not be a part of the workflow. The solution at that point was to shoot in large jpeg format, and adjust the output settings in camera to get as much out of the photo as I can that way.
The last problem was the cameras themselves. I could either rent one more 7D Mark II (yes, I upgraded) and two identical 50mm lenses (50mm on a 1.6x crop sensor camera equates to a focal length of 80mm, close to my prefered full-frame body and 85mm setup), or rent two 1DX bodies with two 85mm lenses. After looking at the prices, it was less than half the cost to rent the 7D2 cameras so that seemed like a no-brainer. That is, until, I decided to see how much of a difference in photo quality there is between the two. I own one of each, including the lenses I would use, and did side-by-side comparison shots of some of the kitties that were laying around. Folks, there’s a reason the 1DX costs what it costs. The pictures it took in that quick comparison were at least 4 times better. Then I realized, again, that once you go full frame you never go back. I’ll be renting two 1DX bodies and two 85mm f1.8 lenses at over twice the cost, simply because the photos will look that much better and that is important to me, since the photos will have my name on them. Have to uphold my rep!
THE WAITING BEGINS
It’s a two week wait for Youth Nationals. I am ready. My tests are done for now. When the rental cameras arrive, I’ll do a quick full-blown setup test with all the cabling in place to ensure that everything works. I have backups and spares for just about everything, and contingency plans if something goes wrong. I’ll be sitting at a table with my laptop, two little remote triggers, and eyes on two platforms at once while monitoring the incoming files making sure they are up to my standards. It will be a very busy weekend, and I won’t be manning my station the entire time either, as we will have VIP packages to shoot and I’ll train up our LiftingLife founders on how to manage the system and what to do if something goes wrong.
Expect a meet summary in a few weeks after it’s all over with 🙂
Thanks for reading