My name is Phil Johnson (@tracktownphoto). My day job is working as a nurse and I took up sports photography as a hobby in 2008. In 2010, I started TracktownPhoto.com as a place to share my photos. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to photograph everything from middle-school sports to the Olympic Trials and the World Championships of Track and Field. I’ve also had several images used on billboards, in magazines and all over the web.

I use two computers for my photography work. I have an eMachines desktop that I bought several years ago.  It has only 2.0GB of RAM and I’ll admit it won’t be long before I send it out to pasture. The other computer I use is an ASUS Notebook U80V, U80A Series with 4GB RAM and a 2.10GHz processor running Windows Vista. It’s lightning fast compared to my desktop, but still quite a bit slower than either of my stepkids computers. All of my data is kept and backed up on WD My Passport external hard drives. I have 5 or 6 of them with data from back to 2008 (and duplicated in most cases). For shooting, I use 8 & 16GB SanDisk Ultra Compact Flash cards for my D4 and D3 and 16GB SanDisk Ultra SD cards for my D600.

Cameras have been a completely different story than computers for me. Since 2008, I’ve shot with a large variety of Nikons and currently use the D600, D3, and D4. For most sporting events, I carry my D4 and my D600 on my Black Rapid double shoulder strap. I use my D3 as a remote camera. The 4 lenses I use most often are my 70-200/2.8, 24-70/2.8, 14-24/2.8, and my 85/1.8. At major sporting events, I’m lucky to have the Nikon Professional Services folks to let me use their equipment. One of my favorite NPS lenses is the 200-400/4.0.

For shots taken near the discus and hammer throw ring, I use a remote cage that I constructed myself using metal shelving and hockey sticks. The remote is a Alzo Digital remote which costs about 1/10th the price of the PocketWizard and has worked well.

My phone is an iPhone 3GS with shattered case. The phone keeps on working great, so haven’t bothered to get a new one. It’s the model with 32GB flash memory, which many of the much newer models don’t have. In it’s current state, I do get a bit embarrassed from time to time when I use it.  Sometimes, I hold my finger over the shattered part of the case.  I’ll probably be forced to upgrade this year.

I do most of my photo processing in Lightroom 4.2.  When I need to blow up photos or do fine tuning, I use Photoshop CS2.