Last week I wrote about all the work that happens before and after I press the shutter. Apparently Lightroom read that and decided I needed a demonstration.

An import that should have taken moments slowed to a crawl, then failed. Lightroom crashed. My external SSD stopped mounting. For a while, the question was not which pictures I wanted to edit. It was whether I could get to the pictures at all.

This is not the exciting part of youth sports photography. Nobody at a football game is hoping for an update on my storage drive. I would also prefer not to be thinking about my storage drive while standing on the sideline. But a photograph only becomes something I can share if I can import it, find it, edit it, and keep it safe afterward.

So I spent a big piece of the week recovering files, checking the catalog, getting the working drive usable again, and testing an import and export. The current setup is working. There are still older catalog links to sort out, which means I am not declaring the entire recovery finished. I am also keeping the recovery copies right where they are. This week has improved my relationship with backups considerably.

Then Tuesday came around, because games have an annoying habit of staying on the schedule no matter what your computer is doing.

I photographed the WMS 7/8th grade football games against Granville, along with the cheer teams working the sideline. Looking through the finished galleries now, I see why I keep doing this. There are the big football moments: a runner trying to break through a tackle, a defender meeting him head-on, a ball hanging in the air with everyone underneath it trying to guess where it will land. Then there are the cheerleaders, lined up along the track with gold pom-poms, making sure the energy does not disappear between plays. By the second game, the field had gone from late day light to stadium lights. It is all one evening, but it does not look or feel like one single thing.

I also brought a "new-to-me" Canon 300mm f/4L IS on my R7. Because of the R7's crop sensor, it frames like roughly 480mm would on a full-frame camera. That is a lot of reach. It is also a fixed focal length, which is photography's way of saying, "Congratulations, you have chosen your spot. Now you better be right because to change it, you have to move."

I used that setup for a handful of the seventh-grade pictures. It gave me tight views of players in the action, including a runner being wrapped up and another heading toward a defender with the ball tucked in. Those frames show what I wanted from the lens: the ability to make a distant play feel close. They also show why I was glad to have my R5 with a 70-200mm alongside it. Most of the published pictures came from that more flexible setup, and all the eighth-grade selections did. A cheer formation close to me and a play across the field do not ask for the same framing. One lens was never going to cover the whole evening.

The R7 has its own wrinkle. Its mechanical shutter is broken, so I can only use the electronic shutter. That does not keep me from using it, but it gives me things to watch: fast movement or panning can skew in a frame, and some artificial lights can cause banding. The 300mm got a useful daylight trial; I am not going to pretend a few published frames proved it would be my answer for every game under the lights. The R5 did the heavy lifting, especially as the evening got darker.

And after the games, of course, I still had to get the images off the cards, sort through the misses and near-misses, edit the keepers, and post the galleries. It was a relief to do that on a working system. It was also a reminder that getting back to work is not the same thing as being finished with the recovery. Both jobs are still real.

Last week's point was that showing up with a camera is only the visible part. This week I got the less glamorous proof. There was a drive to recover, a lens to learn, two games to cover, cheer to include, changing light to manage, and photos to deliver. I missed some things, I learned some things, and I came home with pictures I am glad these kids and families will have.

That is the part worth doing. Even when my storage drive has other ideas.

~Jeremy