Yesterday I had to deal with one of the most frustrating situations you can ever experience in this business: Being the official photographer for an event and then having another photographer turn up.

When the organisers of a local Highland Games asked me to photograph the event this year, the first thing I did was suggest that they stick with the photographer they'd used in previous years. Now you may think that turning down work is bad for business, and in the short term you'd be right. But the code of honour that many photographers conform to is that you don't poach work from others, if for no other reason than you wouldn't like it if they poached work from you. So, in the long term, what's best for business is that if you know someone else usually covers a particular event then you don't take it away from them.

But on this occasion the event organisers specifically wanted me to cover their event as the previous photographer hadn't returned their phone calls. So I arranged to do it for two local papers and everything was looking good.

Or so I thought…

A couple of days before the event, one of the papers contacted me to say that they wouldn't be using my photos after all. The photographer who had covered the event in previous years had told the paper that he had some kind of agreement with one of the organisers, although that person insisted he did not. And to cut a long story short, the newspaper editor took the other photographer at his word, so in a single stroke he had taken work away from me and made me look like a liar. Wow.

But you play with the cards you're dealt. I had lost some sales, but I was also faced with the challenge of covering an event for a Friday paper while someone else was covering it for a Thursday paper. Knowing that the other guy's pictures would hit the street a day before mine, I had to make sure mine were unique, so as well as following the events of the day I had to keep an eye on the other photographer to see what he was getting and, more importantly, to see what he was missing.

The key was to approach the day from a 'news' angle, rather than just going round and snapping everything and anything. So, for example, while the other guy was happy to get big group shots with lots of competitors, I waited until after each event to get pictures of the winners and runners-up. The weather in the morning was atrocious so I got a photo relevant to that, showing the three drenched organisers of the cancelled children's games. (If you can't get a photo of something happening then get a photo of it not happening!) I committed a lot of time to doing action photos from the heavy throwing competition which is the hardest event to get good pictures from, and in doing so I caught one of the stories of the day, that being the only successful caber toss. And I got exclusive photos of the big trophy presentations in the early evening, after the other photographer had left.

In other words I did better news coverage…

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If you're ever faced with a similar situation then there's something else you need to consider, and of course that's the loss of income. You can remedy that by pushing for extra print sales if you're so inclined, but I'm only interested in news sales so what I did on this occasion was get photos of people from outside the area and offer the photos to their respective local newspapers. I got several exclusive photos of big prize winners from other areas of Scotland, and some from overseas.

The advice you should take away from this blog post is simple: If you ever feel tempted to poach work from another photographer then please don't do it. It hurts us all and in the long run it will hurt you.

But if someone poaches work from you then you need to just take it on the chin, stay focused, and rise to the challenge: Do a better job and sell more photos.

At the end of the day this business is all about news and money, so if you keep those two goals in mind then you'll do okay. Hopefully.