I have a bit of a tablet problem – but it’s caused by the problems with tablets. I waited ages before I bought one – partly because I didn’t like the idea of finger-only touchscreens. I had a Toshiba m200 laptop running Windows for Pen years ago and it was great – a pre-cursor of things like the Lenovo Yoga – so I knew what a pen could do and when htc launched the Flyer with one... I had to have it. The pen functionality was good; the rest of the tablet was slow and unreliable. Since then I’ve had three Asus Transformers (all good, but bulky – and Asus are hopeless at keeping them up to date), two HPs (one good, one awful), two Nexus 7s (by Asus, but with Google in charge of the software upgrades... – and both excellent), a Samsung Tab 4 (execrable) and two Nexus 9s (both excellent – one stolen).

It was the Nexus 9 that I used for the experiment in Part III and the one that I assumed I’d take round the world. 10 days before I was due to go, though, I discovered the Samsung Tab A. Bigger (but lower resolution) 9.7” screen, really quick and smooth – and available with LTE (essential for a remote machine in the UK – not so useful on this trip) and an S Pen! I had to have one, so I ordered it immediately.

When I picked it up, I discovered that, in Europe, they’re available with LTE or an S Pen – but not both. It was too late to do anything about it before the trip, so I planned around taking it – and then discovered that in Singapore – our second stop – you could get a version with both – for less than I’d paid for the LTE-only version with the misleading side-on shot that looks a lot like a pen if you’re not paying attention. I didn’t want to risk not actually being able to get one – and I needed to use it before I got to Singapore, so I resigned myself to carrying two tablets around for most of the trip.

When I got to Singapore I also discovered an 8” version with both features but stuck to plan A and bought the 9.7” version in a different colour to my existing one – which will be on eBay in late August... All four parts of this blog were written on it – and all the photos on the trip were edited on it.

So, the complete kit list is – the X-T10, 16-50, 14, 18, 23, 27 (pancake), 35 and 56mm Fujinon lenses and an 8mm Samyang, the Galaxy Tab A in a cheap (£11) Ivso case with a really rather good bluetooth keyboard), a lens pen, an OTG cable, an SD card reader, four spare batteries, an EXPro dual battery charger, a WD My Passport Wireless 2Tb HD (with a built-in SD card reader), a Manfrotto table tripod and a Gorillapod plus a couple of SD cards. Almost everything bar the charger and the HD fits in a small Bilingham Hadley bag (including one of the two supports – provided you have the camera and one lens over your shoulder. It is starting to get quite heavy at that point, but not desperately and it’s really small. On flights, the pop-out padded section goes comfortably into my laptop-less laptop backpack and the outer goes into my checked bag.

That’s it – for four weeks. I did think about taking the X-T1 and grip as well - or instead - but I couldn’t be bothered – the same was true of the 50-140. I spend enough of my time lugging multiple bodies and big lenses around – this was supposed to be a holiday, not an assignment. A holiday that I planned my photography workflow for in advance and on which I wrote a rambling four part blog post, but a holiday, nonetheless.

So, what is the workflow? Again, there are a couple of variations. The simplest is that I take a picture, use the built-in WiFi to connect to the phone and then share the picture straight from the phone. It’s clunkier than it should be, to be honest. The phone and the Fuji rarely connect without having to switch access points (which involves pressing OK on each device...) and transfer is limited to 30 pics, but it works.

If I have a bit more time – coffee stop, say – I’ll send a batch of JPGs over and edit them in Photo Mate R2. Back at the hotel, I ignore the WiFi and plug in the OTG card reader. Each evening I’ll fire up PMR2 and filter it so that it just shows the JPGs and go looking for the ones I want. If they’re OK, I’ll edit them and save them to the Samsung at a Facebook friendly 1600 pixels wide – but if there’s a picture that needs tweaking I’ll switch the filter to RAW and produce the FB image from that.
I’d prefer to do them all from the RAW files, but it is a little slow – not to find or edit images, oddly enough, but to render the JPG can take a couple of minutes per image.

Which leads us to the final variation on the workflow – on long flights or lazy days by the pool – which is OTG and SD directly from PMR2 – but working on the RAW files directly. It’s slow, but it doesn’t matter. Actually, there’s a fifth mobile workflow, enabled by the backup system.

The SD cards are backed up by putting them in to the SD card reader on the external hard driver – which automatically sucks in any new files. Unhelpfully, it doesn’t merge the imports, but creates a new copy of the SD card folder structure – albeit one that only has the folders with new files in it.

I’m grateful for it, though. I took a long sequence (300 pictures) of a sunset in Bali with the intention of making a time-lapse movie. It all seemed to work, but then the card developed a read error in the camera – wouldn’t admit to having any pictures on it – and had lost the most recent DCM folder when viewed via OTG. Three days pictures were gone from the card, but I only lost the most recent day – the ones that weren’t backed up – including some rather nice sunset shots.

This was the first time that not having a PC was a major problem. On my PC I have a range of file recovery packages that might have recovered – might yet recover – the missing files, but no Android equivalents. So the card will have to stay unused for the remainder of the trip.

The fifth workflow method? The backup HD creates its own WiFi hotspot and IP network, so you can edit photos using PMR2 straight off it. It’s slower than OTG, so I wouldn’t have done, normally, but I did bring some of my backlog with me on the drive and I’m trying to catch up.

The drive isn’t perfect – there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to back up from the drive to the cloud – but I’m very glad I had it with me when the card failed. 

Would this workflow also work for ‘work’ photos? We’ll find out when I try it in Scarborough, but I did have a request for a hi-res version of a client picture and I was able to use the ‘cloud’ connectivity that comes with my Asus home router to find it, PMR2 to edit it and Dropbox to send it back to the client, so it very well might.

At the time I didn’t think too much about it but over the years I’ve had a couple of experiments at using EyeFi cards – with varying degrees of success. Varying from none to very little. The technology so nearly works, but not nearly enough to persist with – and it’s SD only. I have a couple of CF adaptors that theoretically allow it to work in the D4 and D4S, but it mostly doesn’t.

What’s supposed to happen is that EyeFi uses a WiFi adapter built in to an SD card to transfer either every shot you take or, more sensibly, the ones you select to upload by protecting them in-camera – via WiFi to either an app on your phone or to a PC over a WiFi network. From there you can also have it send pics to a cloud photo service of your choice – I’ve used Flickr and Facebook with equal success – and to a PC running EyeFi Center [sic]. You can, of course, also share the copies that were stored on the phone to share with whatever service you choose. In theory, you publish and backup every shot you want to. You can even transfer RAW files if you have the Pro cards and a lot of patience.

And it sort of works. Sometimes. I’ve tried it and every shot I’ve tagged has gone where I wanted it, when I wanted it. Usually when I’ve tried it at home before an event. On other occasions, nothing goes up at all and then photos start appearing every couple of hours, days – or even weeks later.

It still works better (in theory, at least) than most of the in-camera WiFi implementations I’ve seen, but there’s a long way to go and you certainly can’t rely on it. (It’s also getting worse, from a pro photographer’s perspective, with key features being removed from later versions of the cards. 

Then in Cali in 2014 I saw a lot of the local photographers using SD card readers and OTG cables to transfer pictures to Android phones. That, I thought, could work. Not always – they were typically shooting just the Colombians, so usually had plenty of time between events to upload a couple of shots – while  was shooting everyone, so could only do it on occasion. Still, I decided it was worth investigating further – so I bought an OTG connector and... did nothing with it.

Heading up to Ampleforth this year for the Junior Road Nationals, I decided that a race with 30 minute laps was the ideal opportunity to try it again, but with a tablet, rather than a phone. The screen on the HTC Nexus 9 is superb and Photo Mate R2 is a superb editing package that works a lot like Lightroom and can handle RAW files.

So, after the race had passed me for the first time, I plugged the Lexar CF radar – sans hub – into the OTG adapter and stuck a card in. It worked fine. PMR2 found the card without a problem and I was able to find and edit a dozen pictures before the race came back. The process worked perfectly... apart from the fact that there was no 2G data signal, let alone 3G or 4G.

Still, it would save me work in the evening, so I persevered. I edited pictures after each pass and exported them at the size the client wanted. The idea was to leave straight after the podium and drive to the hotel – stopping as soon as I saw a decent signal and sending the earlier pictures while I edited the finish and podium shots.

I got to the hotel without ever seeing a signal and, although there was WiFi at the hotel, it didn’t reach my hotel room – so I headed to the pub. For the WiFi, obviously.

With a pint of cider and a WiFi connection, I got a flash report and a finish line shot through, then posted the rest to Flickr and edited the rest of the finish and podium shots. My tablet battery was getting low by then, so I returned to the hotel, wrote the report and grabbed a battery pack. While I was there, I used PM5 to import all the pics – RAW and JPG – to the laptop and back them up to SSD. Purely out of it interest, I took the SSD and the tablet back to the pub while I had dinner and edited a few extra pics on the tablet, from the RAW files. It’s not quick, but it works.

It isn’t perfect. The 8.9” screen on the tablet is good – hi-res, hi-contrast and good colour fidelity – but it’s no match for a 15.4” laptop. Some of the shots I uploaded on the spot weren’t perfect and I did do a few more in the hotel room on the big screen – but, most of the time, it was more than good enough.

I was rather pleased. As a test it had done everything I expected – I didn’t expect to get a data connection  - and I was finished by 9.30 instead of 2am. The real test will be the Youth Circuit Series Finale in Scarborough in August when I have seven races to cover in the day, not just one – but I think it might work. There’s a 3G mast on the top of Oliver’s Mount, too. The only one in Yorkshire, as far as I can tell.

In between, I was off round the world (literally) on holiday and determined to travel light. I had always intended to leave the laptop behind and had always expected to do the digital equivalent of Graham Watson’s early Tour de France workflow – returning to the UK with four weeks worth of photos I hadn’t been able to edit on a dozen SD cards. In Part IV, we’ll see how I pulled everything I’ve learned from Parts I, II and III to make it work – mostly – and I get to moan about a few things that still don’t work as well as they might. 

If you’ve been shooting mirrorless and using OTG or the Apple equivalent for a while, there may not be too many surprises If you’re shooting DSLR and lugging a laptop around, there just might. 

Much as I love the robustness of Compact flash and the promise of XQD, I’m hoping that the D5 has dual SD slots – it’ll save on weight, space, cost and car readers. Speed is of the essence when dealing with large files, so I currently use Lexar’s Professional Workflow hub with a range of plug-in card reader modules. The hub holds four modules, but after the experience of losing three days work along with my laptop and lenses) at the World Cup in Cali in January, the fourth one now holds a 500Gb solid state drive which is the first of three (or, bandwidth permitting, four) backups. That means the other three will have some combination XQD, CF and SD readers, depending on the workflow I’m using.

Given that that’s what this post is about, I should probably tell you what my base workflow is. It varies a little depending on the client and the type of event, but I’ll cover the main variations as we go.

•    I shoot with up the three bodies and, although the camera body is in the EXIF data, I use the filenames to identify the event and the body – mostly because if I use the same three letter event code there’s a real danger that I will and up with files from multiple cameras with the same name. At the World Championships, the codes might be WC8 for the D810, WC4 for the D4 and WCS for the D4S.

•    I always shoot RAW+JPG. How they’re set up depends on how quickly I need to get them out and how many pictures I’m going to shoot. Typically, it’ll be full-fat RAW – 14 bit, uncompressed – and skimmed JPG – Small, Basic files with size optimization. I will shoot –bit small RAW files on occasion and large, fine JPGs optimized for picture quality. And, whenever I can, I set the camera up to save JPGs to CF cards and RAW to XQD or, in the case of the D810, SD.

•    At a relatively short event where I don’t need to deliver pictures until the hours after the shoot or the day after, the JPGs are purely a backup – and two stage backup, at that. Primarily, they’re a second source of images should I lose, break or accidentally format a card with RAW files on. And, yes, I’ve done all three – XQD cards are very fragile. But even if I don’t lose the cards, I have known – very rarely – RAW files to get corrupted. As copying both to the PC doesn’t take much longer than just copying the RAW files – or, relatively speaking, take up much more space – I always copy both across (eventually).

•    If time is of the essence and clients want small files for web use, I’ll put two CF card readers in the hub and copy and edit those initially – copying the RAW files over later. That presents a slight issue in terms of the workflow, which I’ll cover shortly.

•    The next stage is to actually get the pictures across. Here I use Photo Mechanic 5, initially, for three reasons – it copies quickly, it handles multiple card readers and multiple cards swapped in and out of each reader well, and I can pre-prepare IPTC templates for the event – or for different sessions in the event – and have PM5 add the data as it copies them. It’s set up to copy one version to the second SSD in the Chillblast Photo OC laptop and a second copy to the module in the Lexar hub. At the end of the import, that copy goes in my pocket. I then start a copy from the PC to a second PCI-E SSD drive, which will be kept in a different bag to the laptop.

•    What happens next depends on a number of variables. If I have a report to write as well as the photos to deal with – and I have the results – I will import RAW and JPG and point Lightroom at the folder PM5 imported the pictures too and start them importing while I work.

•    If it’s really time critical and I only need a couple of shots,, I’ll import the JPG files in to PM5, find the shots I need and edit them individually in Photoshop. For large quantities to a deadline, I’ll import the JPGs only and use PM5 to rate and code them.

•    My rating system used to be more complex – now I really only use 3 settings (occasionally 4). 5 is a keeper, 1 will be deleted; 4 is a technically good shot, but similar to an existing 5 – I keep those largely because I have some clients who don’t like to have exactly the same shots as certain other clients... Occasionally, I’ll rate something 3 which, at this stage, means that it might be possible to turn the RAW file in to a decent shot, but the JPG’s under or over-exposed or the white balance is further out than is fixable with a JPG.

•    The next thing is to colour code them by client – at which point I may re-rate some of the 4s. For my own sanity, I tend to try to code them with something vaguely logical, but it’s not always possible – red for the Swiss federation, green for Ireland, gold (OK, yellow...) for medalists. If I have more than 5 clients, which I often do, I have to be creative – and if I have two clients in one picture, I hope that there’s a 4 I can up-rate!

•    In a rapid workflow, once they’re all coded, they get imported to Lightroom and I do any twekss that are required there. Each client has a Dropbox folder allocated to them and I create Smart Folders in Lightroom so that all the 5 star folders in a certain colour with that date get published semi-automatically to those folders. This is the biggest improvement in workflow for a long time as the pictures are exported rapidly to a local folder and synched in the background – things don’t grind to a halt every time I need to upload photos – and they don’t have to be done so systematically.

•    A good point to remember – preferably before this stage – is to synchronise the time on your bodies – and set them to local time. Ending up with photos from the same day with different dates can cause problems if you import them into folders with the date as the folder name and if you use Smart Folders for export.

•    This is the slight wrinkle with Lightroom... If you import RAW only, edit them and then import the related JPGs (which I rarely do, but have done on occasion), synchronizing the folder will add the JPGs to the catalog without affecting the edits. Import the JPGs and add the RAW files later and synching will discard all the edits and overwrite the IPTC data with the data from the RAW file. There is an add-on which (usually) gets round this problem – ADDON by THINGY. Thoroughly recommended!

•    A slight variation on this workflow is to import the JPGs in to LR and rate/code them there. It’s not much slower than doing it in PM5 but over a large number of images it can be significant and you have to wait for the LR import before you can start doing anything, so I rarely do it that way.

•    What I do often do in Lightroom is keywording. In Library, I first filter by colour code and add the client name to the keywords. If I’ve had to double up on colour codes, this is gives me a way to separate clients with the same code. Then I’ll select each race and medal ceremmmony and keyword them. Finally, I’ll go through with the results alongside me and keyword medalists. Now i’m ready to work through the list of client requirements.

•    If I have a client who won a medal, race and podium shots of those medalists are done first (I’ll also do versions of those for editorial clients). Next I’ll do the remaining medalists for the editorial clients and finally I’ll work through the individual client teams. That can take hours at a major event, so I tend to rotate through them session by session so nobody’s always last in the queue.

•    The last thing I do is to start a backup of the LR catalog with all the edits and another of all the day’s photos to a spinning-rust device which stays at the hotel. In the safe. If the bandwidth allows, I’ll also do a backup of all the JPGs to Dropbox when I arrive at the track the next day – it rarely does – and is never enough to allow the RAW files to be backed up, but full size JPGs are (marginally) better than nothing.

•    Typically, at about 4am, I then fall in to bed, ready to start again the next day! 

That’s the heavy workflow – and it’s not going away – but I’ve always wanted to have a rapid way of doing things that takes some of the pressure off after the event – and gives clients a better service. I haven’t got there yet, but in Parts III and IV, I’ll talk about what I’ve learned and what I’m now able to do.

After the trivial matter of getting the shot, the two areas I spend most of my time trying to perfect are the amount of weight I have to carry around and my workflow – the first of which, of course, is closely related to getting the shot and the second is all about turning the shot into an image – and getting it to the client in a timely manner. What started out as a short blog post on streamlining both has turned into an epic four parter, the first part of which deals with weight.

Leaving aside the 35kg of unnecessary body weight that I used to lug around – more than all of the photography gear combined - there are a couple of dimensions to weight – camera bodies and lenses, of course – but also laptops, card readers, backup devices and the other capture and editing paraphenalia. That second group is all related to workflow, of course, so we’ll come back to that. Camera gear first.

What I take on a typical sports assignment is always a compromise. If I had access to a van – and a couple of sherpa – it would be nice to know that I had all my lenses with me. You never know what opportunities will present themselves. In practice, I swing between a minimal outfit – the most minimal being just the Nikkor 70-200 – the next up being that and either the Nikon 24-70 or the superb Tamron 15-30 (or, before it was stolen in Colombia, the Nikkor 12-24) and, maybe, the 1.4 teleconverter.

The big kit is all of those plus 20mm, 50mm and 85mm primes (and my 300mm f4 before that, too, was stolen) and then either the Tamron 150-600 or the Nikon 80-400 (and, very rarely) both. Plus the 1.7 TC. And maybe the Nikkor 105 DC. For outdoor races I’ll probably have a selection of filters, too – and for the automotive stuff I’ve started doing, a range of strobes, LED lights, stands, reflectors and softboxes.

The next question is bodies. I usually take two – the D4S is usually first choice, followed by the D810. Sometimes I’ll just take one – and which one will depend on the assignment – and, occasionally, I’ll take the D4 as a genuine backup body.
Even with the full kit, the chances are the D4S will have either the 70-200 or one of the long zooms on it most of the day and the D810 will have one of the wide zooms and the rest will be split between my NewsWear utility belt and a backpack (outdoors) or a wheelie case (velodromes) and fitted as and when they’re needed.

The decision between the two long zooms is a difficult one and, although the Tamron usually wins out, they each have their pluses and minuses. 400mm is usually enough and in theory the 80mm wide end of the Nikon means that I don’t need the 70-200 (although Murphy ensures that I need to lose 10mm to frame the pic more often than I’d like) – but the Tamron is as sharp at 600mm as the Nikon is at 400mm and, while it has to be handled slightly more carefully, the IS is superb.

Either way, it’s a lot of kit and, inevitably, on any given day much of it doesn’t get used. I do try to plan ahead, studying the courses for outdoor races and checking them out using the excellent PlanIt!Pro for Photographers which will overlay sunrise and sunset times and directions as well as depth of field and angles of view for different lenses, cameras, apertures and subject distances on top of Google Maps. Brilliant for ensuring that if you have no choice but to shoot into the sun at the finish line, you at least have the option of some fill flash. It will also show you that there are no straights worthy of the 600mm or vistas that can be captured with the 15...

But some of you will be saying ‘You’re just playing at the margins – trying to find ways of taking slightly less obsolete, heavy DSLR kit when you could go mirrorless’. Sadly, for now, you’re wrong – mirrorless is great for travel photography – of which, more in Part II – but hopeless for sports photography for half a dozen reasons - AF performance is good in certain conditions, but not good enough in most; lens choice is far too limited – especially at the long end; electronic viewfinders don’t respond quickly enough; the bodies and lenses are starting to get some weather sealing, but they’re nowhere near robust enough; RAW buffers aren’t big enough (also a problem on some high-end DSLRs, to be fair) and on-camera flashes aren’t good enough. Oh – and poor battery life (because of small batteries, because of small bodies – ironically).

It will all come in time, but there’s no sign of it coming any time soon. And with two bodies and lots of long, fast lenses, the weight and size advantages will be way down the list of reasons to convert – and will mostly disappear on full-frame bodies.

But as we’ll see in Part IV – for some things they’re perfectly fine. For some sports stuff they’re fine, too – but  you have to work within the limitations. To try to avoid always taking the same shots at Monday night track league, I do a series of theme lights – one zoom night (the 70-200, inevitably), prime night (usually the 85mm f1.8 – but I’ve done it with the 300mm f4 and the 105mm f2 DC), black and white night and, more recently, Fuji night.

Pre-V4Before the V4 firmware upgrade for the X-T1, sports shooting wasn't so much hit and miss as mostly miss

The first Fuji night was all done using the X-T1 and the 56mm f1.2 – which is essentially equivalent to the 85/1.8 on the full frame Nikon. It was OK, but the relatively poor ultra-high ISO performance – and we’re talking relative to the D4S – and the lack of a decent flash system meant that it was only really feasible at midsummer, and even then the end of the evening was a real challenge.
The second time I tried it with the 50-140 (70-200 equivalent) and it was a disaster – the body/lens combo just wouldn’t track anything other than big objects on plain backgrounds in good light – fine for airliners on approach at LHR, but pretty useless for track cyclists in the setting sun. The keeper rate with the 56 was way down on shooting with the D4S (which is what you’d expect – but with the 50-140 is was close to zero. 

The new V4 firmware for the X-T1 changed that dramatically. The problems as the floodlights come on and the sun disappears completely remain – the low ISO range and lack of flash are compounded by the AF system giving up again – but in good light it works very well. The IS and the optics were always promising and the body is now up to the job. Bodies, in fact, because the new X-T10 worked almost as well. The frame rate is lower and there’s no grip, so portrait mode shooting is awkward, but it’s really very good.

If they want to play in the space occupied by the D4S and 1D X (sort of...), it’s there for them – if Canon or Nikon doesn’t get there first. But there’s work to do. I suspect the first really capable mirrorless sports/PJ camera will be competing with the D6 – or maybe the D5s.

So the conclusion to this ramble is that, if you want to travel light and shoot sports, the best bet is the old faithfuls – two bodies, a wide zoom and the trusty 70-200. In Part III I’ll talk about slimming down the workflow and there, in the field, at least, there is more hope. Part II, though, is all about the current workflow.

There's a lot to catch up on, but with no more events until the next round of the Revolution in Manchester on January the 3rd, I'm hoping to get a lot more galleries up in between now and then.

In the meantime, there are still a few calendars are left - so make sure you manage to get one before they all go!

The other thing that happened - which was a lot of fun - was that the UCI made a little video about what I do at an event - enjoy...

I've played with trial versions of Zenfolio before but it was all rather impenetrable - but no more. I was up and running in hours with something that bears a passing resemblance to my original site - as well as those in between. I'm very impressed - and I hope you are.

I've also taken the decision not to print my own photos any more. It was a tough decision to take, but it should mean a quicker service for you. I do have the option to bring it all back in house, so please let me know how the experience goes.

This site will be used for 'event' photography - track league, youth and junior racing, car stuff - and there will be some trackcycling photography here. Anything of anyone famous, though, will, in future, be going on to http://alamy.com - which will be the only place you'll be able to buy photos online for commercial use. If you need to use anything here for advertising, sponsors etc - please contact me via the contacts page.

The other thing you won't find here is my 'fun' stuff - landscapes, wildlife, street and aviation photography. The last of those may move here eventually but, in the meantime, you can buy prints of those from my 500px gallery at http://www.guyswarbrick.com

It's going to take a while to get the archive up - some some patience will be required. If there's a specific event you'd like to see added, let me know and I'll see if I can bump it up the queue.

Until then - enjoy!