2025 World Archery Championships / Gwanju, South Korea

In September 2025 I flew to Gwanju, South Korea to serve as part of the team covering the World Archery Congress and the World Archery Championships. Whereas the rest of the team were working solely on the live content, broadcast globally from the very fancy “box” which is essentially a very well kitted out shipping container, I was the only camera operator focussing on non-live content. So while the action was covered, I was behind the scenes, following the athletes as the warmed up, prepared themselves, practiced, battled nerves and celebrated with their teams.

Having working in many sports as a camera operator, but never archery, it took a wee while to full tune into the rhythm of the competition, but soon enough I learned to work the “ends” efficiently mixing camera systems, from gimbal walk outs, to tight athlete ISOs, to in crowd footage and back through to being on hand for the winning moment. As I was told by my producer Danny (of Dear Green Productions), archery as a sport has very little movement, so we need to inject the movement into it. So lots of gimbal pushes, parallax tracking and such like, generally working with the 50mm as that gave the best image by compressing the crowd slightly into the athlete on the platform.

Another fun challenge was having to scoot across town after a long competition shooting day, to set up and film a broadcast interview, Netflix style, with the new president of World Archery, in his hotel room. We had about 20min to set up a two camera set up, with a simple key light and utilising an existing lamp as a practical in the background. It was certainly an intense period of focused work to get it right, but it did the job and the resulting interview eventually found its way to CBS as a sports special on the US archery team.