Spiral Bound Journal

Prepwork

That's what I get for procrastinating, Dana thought as she scanned the Olympic Games YouTube page for anything useful relating to handball.

In truth, Dana had plenty of things she could have been doing on a Saturday afternoon: putting away laundry, going on an outdoor run, sorting photos from a recent shoot in Wisconsin, anything but binging videos of obscure sports. It wasn't the sports themselves that bothered Dana (although race walking was brutal on her attention span). It was the sheer volume of sports watching and research she needed to complete. Dana had been plugging away at this research since March when she first learned she'd been selected for the photography competition pilot, but she knew her time to complete this was starting to run out.

With a sigh, she shifted her attention away from YouTube for a moment to review her digital paperwork from the Paris Organizing Committee. Granted, she was reviewing it for at least the fifth time. Each time, she worried that she was missing something. A couple weeks prior to this frustrating afternoon, Dana received all the documents detailing the structure of the pilot and what work needed to be completed prior to her arrival in Paris. Unlike entering a single work for the Minnesota State Fair, the photography competition pilot involved a long period of real time shooting and a heaping helping of unpredictability. According to the itinerary, she could expect to be taking photos over a period of 10 days. She would find out which specific events she would cover upon her arrival. Hence, she needed to have working knowledge of around 50 different sports along with all their subcategories. Dana re-read the pre-arrival instructions for reporting her equipment and wondered if it would have been less work to get a law degree. She rubbed her face in an attempt to stave off a headache.

"Make any headway?"

Dana looked up and found Quinn standing in front of the TV. She set her laptop aside and repositioned herself on the sectional's chaise.

"Not really," she admitted. "I know we watched handball together a few years back, but trying to find videos so I can watch it from a photography perspective is quite difficult. It's like regular basketball but with a wider range of potential shots for goals and everyone moving around. At least with water polo the swimming isn't super fast."

"Even though that sport actually looks difficult when you're watching it on TV."

"Yeah, water polo is no joke. The space for that is smaller than a handball court, so that has its pros and cons. It's easier to keep a general eye on the action, but it's harder to move around. Handball seems to have the opposite problem."

"Seems like you know enough about handball to identify challenges in photographing it."

Dana shrugged. "Perhaps. It's still a lot to wrap my hands around."

"I bet. Break time?"

Dana glanced at her laptop. "You know what? It probably is."

With that, she put her laptop in sleep mode and stood up to stretch. Even if she stayed in the house, a good 15 minutes away from the computer (and its oodles of files for her upcoming competition) would do her some good.