The Life of a Trigger Walker Photographer

There have been several times that I've been asked, "When will those pictures finally be up on the site" and most recently, "How come it takes you guys so long to put new pictures up?" So, I thought I'd just sit down and let you guys know exactly why pictures don't always get posted the day after an event.

First, I would like to comment on what a fantastic job Noah "DJ" Paris is doing with taking pictures and his willingness to travel to different fields so that we can have a variety of pictures from a variety of places. That being said, he is still new to us, and we (him and I) are still trying to figure out the best process for taking, editing and posting pictures. We are trying a new media, video, along with trying to perfect the old, pictures, and we still don't know the best way of doing things yet. This will result is some trial-and-error and some patience on both our parts(you the viewer and us, TriggerWalkers.com).

Second, I would like to point out something that a lot of people surprisingly over look. We take, edit and post pictures of you at Open Plays for FREE. You (the player) don't pay us anything for our services. Though we enjoy standing around for 4 hours and taking pictures of other people playing paintball and having a good time, this does not pay our bills. We have camera equipment, video equipment, computers, software, web servers, and living expenses that we have to pay for. That being said, we have to hold down jobs. Noah and I (John) are fortunate enough to have full-time jobs. Noah sometimes works 7 days a week. We have friends and relatives that depend on us and therefore cannot make taking, editing and posting pictures of people that we hardly even know our number 1 priority. We do, however, take any paid job very seriously and will make sure pictures and video are available in a timely fashion.

Third, I assume most people already know this, (but you know what they saying about ass-u-me'ing) Posting pictures isn't as easy as plugging the camera into the computer and clicking the "post pictures to my website" button. Though that button may exist for some people, we have a different method (and that's what I think separates us from your average-Joe). We take hundreds of pictures at an event, sometimes thousands. And, we go through every single picture. We pick out the the great pictures and discard the blurry, out-of-focus pictures. But, we don't stop there, we adjust the brightness, contrast, and colors of the pictures to make every player in every photo look like a pro. This in the process I was talking about in the first paragraph. Sometimes this takes hours, days, or even weeks. When you've got friends and family depending on you, jobs that work you 7 days a week and you receive nothing more then a "Thanks! You guys are cool. Why did it take so long?" after working hours on pictures for strangers, for no money, it's hard to convince yourself that this should be a top priority.

So, I hope I've answered your questions of, "How come it takes you guys so long to put new pictures up?" and I hope you better understand why we can't be completely focused on making every walk-on player happy by providing pictures of him/her on the day after an event. "The day after" is our goal but, realistically, it doesn't happen very often. Sometimes it will take a week or maybe even two depending on what is happening in our lives.

Now, I did mention that we do take paid events very seriously. We will work hard to make those pictures and videos available in a timely fashion. If you wish to hire us to take pictures or video of an event or a team practice, or any other type of event you can think of, you can email me or Noah at: johnlink@triggerwalkers.com or noahparis@triggerwalkers.com