The zine for season 20 of AZ Rivals of Aether was posted here yesterday, which marks to “completion” of my first long(ish) term photography project. The process overall has really helped develop my work flow, and I wanted to quickly talk about the creative process around making the Zine.

Taking (and editing) Photos

The first few events that I took pictures at preceded the actual season that the zine covers, so I had a few events where I could figure things out. The venue where most of the weeklies take place has a few challenges that makes photography particularly difficult. Firstly, the venue is pretty dimly lit, many of the photos from the early events in the season are underexposed and needed to be fixed in editing, this photo is a pretty good example of that. Despite the issues, I really like this picture, even through the shotty exposure, the tension and excitement easy to see.

Secondly, a lot of the lights that I do have to work with are just color blue, and the changing colors from the monitors can be any number of things. Early on, I tried to correct this one possible, I definitely over did it in the orginal edit. Many of these early photos required a re-edit to fix. After a few weeks, I accepted that I’d just need to crank the ISO and generally chose to over expose regardless of how little light was available. Editing the photos got a lot easier, and the increased noise is mitigated by the shadows being less pushed in post processing. Sometimes, the different lights would just play too much havoc on the composition, instead of trying to fiddle with it to death, I just pushed the “monochrome” button, problem solved.

These problems weren’t all present in the other venues featured in the Zine, I had a lot more freedom to expirement with the more consistent lighting, and a lot of the photos just came out a lot better.

Esports on Film

One of the things I expiremented with a couple of times this season was shooting some pictures on film. I would end up bringing a film camera to two events, Lunar 4 and Rize 007. Lunar 4 was at a new venue to us, and was held during the early afternoon. Before hand, I checked the venue on Google Streetview, and saw that it had large windows that would be exposed to light, so I decided before hand that I’d shoot the event primarily on film, which became entirely on film while I was taking pictures at the event.

This might be my favorite spread in the whole zine. The first half has great layering, and following the gaze of the spectators draws attention to the game in progress, while the second half is silhouettes the two players while placing them in the context of the larger venue. Placed together it really highlights how games take place in a short moment of time, and the placement in the zine also serves as a transition from one part to another, more on that later.

I’d also bring film to Rize 007, more as an experiment with pushing film for darker indoor lighting. Frankly, most of the pictures on the roll where out of focus, and I scratched about a quarter of the roll during processing, and I somehow got a double exposure. No idea how that happened.

The last photo in the zine came off this roll of film, thanks to being pushed up a stop, I was able to grab this picture in a pretty dark outdoor hallway, with the subject well isolated thanks to the high contrast of the film. The nostaglic look from the film grain and the little bits of lens flare really makes this a good photo to send out the whole zine.

Both of these two rolls of film that are featured in the zine are Ilford HP5, a high contrast, and pretty grainy film. The high contrast makes these photos really stand out from the other black and white photos. There’s also some sort anachronism with taking pictures of people playing video games on black and white film, maybe that says something, I don’t really know.

Putting it All Together

I decided early in the process that I wanted to present the zine as if the whole season was condensced and presented as one match. So there’s smaller sections that follow players walking up to the match, the reactions during the match, the end of the match, and ending with everyone leaving the venue. I think it mostly works. Every now and then there are some full bleed spreads, I mostly used this to hightlight compositions across two pictures, or just particularly good photos. Another early choice was to credit everyone who participated in an event at the end of the zine, there’s a limited number of pictures I can choose, and I wanted to bring attention to everyone who played even if they weren’t featured. Speaking of which, here’s a selection of pictures from March that didn’t make the final cut.