I missed last week's blog post. I'd like to say it was because I was carefully considering what to write, but mostly I was looking at the number of images waiting for me in Lightroom and wondering when I was supposed to sleep and/or do my actual job (lol).

Tuesday was seventh and eighth grade football against Zanesville, with the cheer teams working the sidelines. Then came the junior high versus JV soccer scrimmage. Friday was Youth Night and varsity boys football against Licking Heights. Three very different shoots, all in the same week.

And each time I got back to the computer, the number waiting for me seemed to get bigger: around 9,000 images, then 11,000, then 14,000.

To be clear, those are not 14,000 photographs I think anyone should have to look through. A lot are bursts from the same play, near-misses, or frames where everything was almost right except the one thing that mattered. Unfortunately, the ball does not let me know in advance which frame is going to be the good one.

The first pass is fairly ruthless. Missed focus, blocked faces, awkward timing, gone. The harder pass comes next, when several images are technically good but only one really tells the story. Maybe it is the way a player turns through a tackle, the expression just before a soccer challenge, or a cheerleader caught in a moment I might have missed if I had only been watching the field.

Friday's gallery has football under the lights, but it also has the band and the atmosphere around Youth Night. Those pictures belong there. Years from now, someone may remember the game through a photograph that was not taken during a play.

Once the selections are made, there is still editing. Tuesday's light does not look like Friday's light. The soccer field asks for something different from the football stadium. Every finished image needs at least a decision about exposure, color, crop, and whether it is actually ready to share. Then I have to export everything, put it in the right place, upload it, and check that families can find the gallery they came for.

Over the last few weeks, I have written about a storage problem that made me question whether I could get to my photos at all, and about the problem of getting finished galleries in front of people when the usual way of sharing links is changing. This week was the part in between those two problems. I had the images. I knew where I wanted them to end up. I just had a mountain of work between those points.

Somewhere in the middle of it, the old "Do I actually belong doing this?" thought showed up.

It is a strange thing to feel while sorting through thousands of photographs from games I went out and covered. But being busy does not make the doubt disappear. Sometimes it makes it louder. I look at a frame I missed or a decision I would make differently now, and it becomes very easy to forget about the work that did go right.

I do not think getting past impostor syndrome means convincing myself I have nothing left to learn. That would be a pretty quick way to stop getting better. But I am starting to notice something: I would not be worrying so much about whether I belong in these situations if I had not already done the work to get there. I keep showing up. I make the photographs. I go through the ridiculous number of files afterward. I finish the galleries and get them out to the people who were there.

That does not mean every frame is a winner. It means the doubt is not the whole story.

So, yes, last week's post is late. The photographs took priority, and I am okay with that. The families who came looking for Tuesday's games, the scrimmage, or Friday night deserved finished galleries more than they needed me to be on time with a blog post about making them.

I am glad I made those pictures. I am also glad the number on my screen is considerably smaller now.

~Jeremy