The largest fun run in Sydney since the start of the pandemic!

Coming off a big few weeks of shooting Australia Day events for Northern Beaches Council, we rolled straight into shooting the Sun Run on the first weekend of February. Harnessing a 10km course that snakes from Dee Why beach to finish on the iconic Manly beachfront, the 2022 Sun Run with 4300 entrants was by far the largest fun run in NSW since the start of the pandemic. This blog post won’t touch on the technical side of the photography, instead it is going to give you an insight into the planning and execution that goes into the successful coverage of a mass-participation event.

The start of the Sun Run 2022 at Dee Why Beach on the Northern Beaches of Sydney

The brief

This was our second year shooting the creative brief for the marketing team from Northern Beaches Council. Our role wasn’t to capture every competitor, the mass competitor photos were being handled by another group. Instead, our role was to capture a photography and videography package for NBC to use post-event and in the run-in to the event next year. Our photos and video end up all over their social media channels and, as you will see a bit later on, occasionally go much much further than that!
The brief for all NBC events is always nice and simple….capture the overall vibe of the event, capture happy people, capture the magic of the Northern Beaches coastline….basically, do justice to the time, effort, and money that the NBC Event Operations team put into organising and executing these events. I will always shoot NBC events to that overall brief, and the marketing team will let me know if there are any specifics they need captured.

The team

This year I had a larger budget, so I was able to bring on an extra hand to help with capturing the creative brief. I put together a team of three dedicated photographers, a dedicated videographer, and then a hybrid photographer/videographer whose role was to support the videographer and capture a few specific photos for me. It is a team that I can rely on, knowing they will just go about their work without fuss and have the professionalism to deal with anything that might get thrown their way. This last bit is the most important….you can be the most skilled, artful photographer, but if you don’t have the people skills and the ability to overcome obstacles with a “no worries” attitude, you won’t last in this type of work. People willing to undercut you on price are a dime-a-dozen, so your value that differentiates you from the pack comes from your organisational skills and the relationships you develop with clients.

The start area was super dark, and required the use of some artificial lighting. Not ideal, but better than dark photos!

The plan

Prior to this type of event, I draw up a detailed timeline of the event and then put together a plan for each photographer. I’ve lived on the Northern Beaches my whole life so I’m very familiar with the area, but I still go out prior to the event and spend an hour scouting locations to work out what our shots will be. That means that we aren’t just “winging” things on event day when we turn up to a location, we are turning up to shoot with a purpose.

Our opportunities for aerial photography were limited by the wind, but we still managed to grab a couple of shots

For some of the shots, there really aren’t any second chances, and the entire event from start to finish is done and dusted in around 2 hours. The plan is about getting the shots that we need, but also being realistic….we can’t afford to hang around at one location any longer that we absolutely need to in order to get the shot, because doing so could compromise a shot further down the course.

One of the shots you definitely cannot afford to miss.

The execution and delivery

With a solid plan in place, and everyone briefed on what they need to do, it just comes down to executing it on event day. Each of the photographers knows what they need to do, they’ve got their shot list, and they are armed with SD/CF cards supplied by me so that they can just drop them to me at the end of the event. I don’t have physical contact with each photographer, because some of them head straight to other areas (e.g. finish line or the second half of the course), so we all touch base via phone to ensure everyone is in place.

One of our planned shots. The final photo will be cropped tighter, but we have to shoot a bit wider than usual to give the marketing team the room they need to drop in their text copy over the top of the photo.

With these big events, I turn up a lot earlier than I actually need to be there. It’s not for my benefit, but the benefit of the client. I can touch base with the operations team before they get too busy, let them know that my team is ready and everything is under control, and then I don’t have to pester them again at all until the event is over. For the Sun Run, this meant a 4 a.m. alarm so that I could arrive just before 5 a.m.

This one didn’t make the final cut, but it had me in absolute stitches when I saw the expressions!

Before we know it, the SunRun is underway. I start skipping my way along the course capturing my planned shots, and the team keep each other updated with the progress of the competitors. The pointy end of the field finish the 10km run just 31 minutes after they started. The remainder of the field, including the families and kids in the 7km event, will stream through the finish arch at Manly over the next 90 minutes.

The event doesn’t go perfectly, it never does. Thankfully the rain held off, but some strong winds meant we couldn’t put up drones at some of the planned locations. At one location (where I’m glad I persisted because the final shot was worth it), I chewed through a drone battery in 5 minutes because it was fighting so hard to hold itself steady into the wind! These things happen, and in the grand scheme of things it isn’t a huge issue.

I got to the finish area about 20 minutes before the final finisher. The vibe around Manly was amazing, and it was so refreshing to see all the local cafes and restaurants doing a roaring trade with post-run patrons. There was also a huge crowd cheering home the back end of the field. I stayed at the finish area with one of my other photographers until the very last competitor crossed that line. In terms of marketing value, photos of that last competitor overcoming adversity to achieve their goal is far more valuable than the photo of the guy at the pointy end of the field smashing a 31 minute 10km. Once they’re done, I head straight home to get started on the delivery of the brief.

The delivery

For these types of events, we are on a very tight delivery timeline, because the marketing team want to be able to harness some of those post-event endorphins to get competitors thinking about entering next year. During the event, I get my photographers to rate or lock (depending on model of camera) a couple of their best shots, and these form the basis of the very first offload to the social media team. As soon as I get home, I pop the cards into my computer and Photomechanic pulls just the locked photos, leaving the rest to be dealt with shortly. I end up with about 10 photos, which I drag into Lightroom and apply a quick edit and then forward onto the marketing team. Less than half an hour after the last competitor finished, they’ve published some killer shots across all their social media platforms.

While this is going on, the video team are hard at work. The first job is to quickly cut together 10 seconds of footage (3-5 clips) to be sent out with the event press release. They then get onto editing together the event wrap video. They have about 5 hours to get this done….a very tight timeline for a polished 1 minute event wrap video, but again it is important to get it turned around so that Council can send it out that afternoon on their social media platforms.

Probably my favourite photo of the day. These are the types of shots that the marketing teams love, because it really captures the vibe of the event. The little bloke told me he is already looking forward to the City2Surf (14km!!)

After a coffee and a bit of food, I get back to the bulk of the photo work. Between the photographers, we’ve ended up with about a thousand photos. Important lesson here: we really work on not overshooting, we always shoot with a purpose! The client doesn’t need hundreds of photos for their brief, and I don’t need to be culling thousands of photos.

My first cull in Photomechanic (I’ll touch on Photomechanic in another blog post) removes any where the composition just isn’t right, or focus has been missed. From there I do a second round of culling, where each photo is asked “do you meet the marketing brief?”. This process has to be ruthless. That final cull got me down to about 150 photos, which I dragged into Lightroom. We put a big emphasis on getting the shots as close to correct in camera as possible, so minimal editing is required, usually just a bit of exposure adjustment.

Around 2 hours after the event finished, the Council marketing team have received ~150 final photos and my work is essentially done.

A few hours later, the video team get their draft to the client and after one tiny tweak to one of the captions, the video is finalised and shared across their social media platform.

The awesome work done by James Walker of Skywalker Studios on behalf of Freshie Photography!

For us, that is the end of the work. The client was super happy, and we were satisfied with a busy, but very successful day. Then I got the message…..Channel 9 had picked up the footage sent out earlier with the press release, and they were likely to run it in their 6pm bulletin. For context, this is the most-watched news bulletin in Australia. I fully expected it would be run late into the bulletin as a bit of a filler piece. Then, whilst watching the third story of the bulletin, a piece about COVID recovery, our footage suddenly appeared with some voiceover about fun runs returning as a sign of COVID recovery. It was frankly surreal, and a nice bit of icing on the cake of a successful day shooting a great community sporting event!

Some of our video work (at 2:57 in this piece) making it’s way onto the 9News Sydney primetime bulletin!