When and how to caption

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mjukphoto

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The context of my question is shooting Cricket at County level but I'd be happy to hear anyones opinions on this from any sport.

I understand the principal of captioning. Why it needs to be done and how to do it. My question is more when you do it and how you go about that.

The problem with cricket is there's about 7 hours of waiting around for killer moments of action that happen in a millisecond (a clean bowl for instance) and in my experience they have a knack for occuring the very moment you put the camera down. So should I just be waiting for the intervals and then caption like crazy based on a note book or some such or do you just risk it and upload and caption as you get the good shots. I was considering tethering as a good option as I'll tend to be sitting int he same spot for a few hours at a time and would certainly make captioning and workflow a bit easier but I know people on here generally don't seem too keen on tethering.

I'm worried this happens:

Great shot of Batsman hooking for a boundary, pull out the card to upload the shot, upload, caption, look up just in time to see (but not shoot) his middle stump go cartwheeling out of the ground.

Thoughts?
 
Buy another card for the camera and swap them over when you want to upload...and only do it at the end of the over.
 
How about buying a cheap dictaphone, and at each wicket recording a time check and quick description of what happened. All without taking your eyes off the action.

Hang it round your neck so you can drop it quickly if necessary.

This all assumes you're sitting on your own to avoid looking a bit silly :lol:
 
One thing I've seen some agency togs do (not sure if this is available on your 7D).
They photograph and when they see images they are going to wire off to their agency - they use the 'record' function and speak the captions.
Naturally they have all the 'regular' info already pre-loaded so it fills those up.. but then for example they say "Liverpool number 7 Happy Harry scores past Blackpool number 1 Mike Motty...."
Then as they wire the images - they have someone captioning it at that end.. (never seen this in UK.. but elsewhere in the world see it quite often).

I know this maybe doesn't help you..(or people working on their own).

But in cricket there's always that bit of waiting time between bowling actions - so remove teh card..replace it with another.. that's how I would go about it.
 
If you get Photomechanic set up properly, with all the possible actions as presets in Notepad, then it shouldn't really be an issue. You are probably looking at typing 8-10 characters at most after injest.

If you do a search for Photomechanic on here you'll find a couple of threads where people have outlined their workflow.


Googs, it's only the 1D series that has image lock and sound files available, and I'd imagine that the British snappers don't send their voice files off because they're expected to do the job properly!! :lol:
 
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Quite impressed with PM in terms of workflow, can now see why its so popular! are there any threads or online resources to learn more about it though? It's obviously very powerful but not very accessible straight off the bat (as it were ;) Particularly about the shortcuts for captioning, can't work that out
 
mjukphoto said:
Quite impressed with PM in terms of workflow, can now see why its so popular! are there any threads or online resources to learn more about it though? It's obviously very powerful but not very accessible straight off the bat (as it were ;) Particularly about the shortcuts for captioning, can't work that out
Click to expand...


*cough*

DemiLion said:
If you do a search for Photomechanic on here you'll find a couple of threads where people have outlined their workflow.
Click to expand...

From memory Camera Bits have a couple of online video tutorials on their website, and there's bound to be something on uTube somewhere.
 
I have searched and found some threads, it was more of a question of is there something out there that I would miss otherwise. I could sift through a hundred threads all over the internet but if there's one really good one that people know about then it would be good to know. I'm not just being a pain in the arse. Certainly not trying to be at least. Well Thanks for the answers folks I shall go and do some research on the subject all the lines of all your tips and will stop asking stupid questions.
 
Nope it's not stupid. As you said PM is not exactly intuative, and any help is always going to be a bonus.

The reason why I re-emphasised the search is that from memory there are only a few threads that show up when using the full name (most on here refer to it as PM), and there is one that is quite detailed. I saved a link to it, but I'm on a work PC at the moment. From memory it's at least 9 months old, so you may need to twiddle with your search parameters!
 
Photomechanic has the text expansion stuff in the application. It's under Edit->settings->Set Code replaments.

That where you load in your tab separated text files.
 
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