Member-only story
A Photographic Pentathlon: Five Events, Four Days
Cross-training keeps your skills sharp
The Greek Olympics had a peculiar, five-event competition, the Pentathlon. It included running, long jump, javelin, discus, and wrestling. The modern Olympics have their own strange version that includes fencing, swimming, equestrian show jumping, and a combined “laser run” of running and shooting electronic pistols.
Five of us photographers have just returned from our own mini-Pentathlon in Sonoma County, California. Hosted by Live View Editor Derrick Story, it, too, had five events. Over four days, we photographed the Sonoma coastline, some local vineyards and a winery, the Pacific Coast Air Museum, the Safari West wildlife park, and the Armstrong Redwoods Reserve.
I won’t belabor the sports analogy much further, but it’s an apt one. Amateur photographers, by definition, work for the love of it. They do their own thing. They don’t answer to clients or deadlines. And so they — and by ‘they’ I mean ‘we’ — can get lazy.
A multi-subject workshop is like a yoga class. It stretches underused muscles. It’s also cross-training on a compressed schedule. Each new environment is like a Pentathlon event, calling for different thinking, different skills, and some experimentation. And there was a deadline: at the end of four days, a…
