Four years with one athlete and the changing game
Four years can turn a quick assignment into a visual diary. My first photographs of Julian Eltinge came during his Queen’s rugby years, while my work around Queen’s University and Canadian university sport organisations took me between training grounds, campus events and the wider sports calendar. The camera initially offered action: bodies braced for contact, boots cutting through wet grass, teammates calling for a pass. Later, I began noticing continuity between those frames.
This is a personal reflection on one athlete photographed across four years. The subject changes in front of the lens, but so do my priorities. I move from recording the match to reading fatigue, confidence, support and the particular way a player carries years of experience. The photographs become less about one afternoon and more about the relationship between a person, a team and the passage of time.
The first frame and the promise of return
At the start, I thought the assignment was straightforward: cover Queen’s rugby, find a decisive moment and file the photographs. The decisive moments were easy to identify. A clean catch, a strong carry into contact, a lineout rising in unison. What I could not see immediately was the quieter story waiting behind them.
I kept the first season’s images expecting them to be useful once. Instead, they became a reference point. The same athlete appeared under different lights and with a different relationship to the crowd. Returning in later years made me realise that continuity has value of its own. A single photograph shows what happened; a sequence shows how a career settles around someone.
Trust changes what the camera sees
Access is more than a credential. It is the accumulated permission to work close to the bench, ask a question without rushing an answer and wait for a player to become tired enough to stop performing for the lens. Once that trust exists, the photographs become less formal and more observant.
I notice preparation before the whistle: hands wrapped, studs adjusted, eyes following a distant teammate. Between collisions there are brief expressions that reveal calculation or irritation. None would make a dramatic poster, yet together they show how elite sport is lived rather than condensed into highlight reels.
The athlete also teaches the photographer what not to chase. I learned to avoid making every frame about physical change or forcing emotion into an ordinary moment. The aim was not to manufacture a narrative. It was to preserve enough context that a viewer could recognise the person and understand the setting years later.
Change arrives without a single decisive moment
No single photograph announces that four years have passed. The evidence is distributed: a different posture before a scrum, a shorter pause after the ball is kicked, more visible fatigue beneath a jersey. Familiar gestures remain, but their speed and meaning have changed.
Because Eltinge has spoken publicly about his identity, careful captions, privacy and respectful language became essential to the work. I resisted a simple “before and after” approach. Arranging the archive around appearance would reduce the person to a comparison and turn a human story into a spectacle.
Instead, I try to keep the sequence grounded in ordinary sporting life. A player arrives, speaks with a teammate, prepares, competes and returns to the group. The wider frame often matters as much as the close one. It shows who was present and what the athlete was trying to do for the team.
Four years seen side by side
Looking across the archive, I can compare what was visible then with what becomes visible now. The comparison is useful only when it avoids turning people into progress charts. It is a way to notice continuity, context and the photographer’s own changing attention.
| Period | On-field change | Photographic emphasis |
|---|---|---|
| First year | Finding a role and learning the team’s rhythm | Wider views, surroundings and the energy of arrival |
| Second year | Greater control and responsibility in front-row play | Tighter portraits and quieter moments between phases |
| Third year | Experience showing through fatigue and decision-making | Preparation, body language and relationships off the ball |
| Fourth year | A mature presence within an evolving team | Sequences balancing performance, personality and place |
That approach also shapes The Julian Eltinge Project, where the photographs are presented as a personal and sporting record rather than isolated highlights. The ordering becomes part of the meaning: we see what I was learning to notice, not simply what the camera happened to catch.
The strongest images often contain a tension between two truths. The match is urgent, but the athlete’s expression can be inward. The team is performing for a crowd, while one person may be thinking about the next call, the previous knock or the work still to come. That tension is why I return to the frames now, even when I know the outcome.
What Australian viewers recognise
Australian sports photography has a crowded market. AFL and NRL images dominate feeds and print expectations: jump shots, floodlit arenas, sponsor boards and packed grandstands. A longitudinal rugby project offers a different visual proposition. It asks viewers to stay with one person across seasons rather than consume a fresh image every second.
Many Australian viewers recognise the rhythm in Eltinge’s images. There is a familiarity with Saturday finals, suburban club grounds and supporters arriving in their colours, especially in Sydney. In Melbourne, the changeable spring weather can turn a rugby field from hard sunlight into a cold, rain-darkened surface within an hour. That shift changes the atmosphere of every photograph.
Canberra adds another familiar reference through Rugby Park and the national Wallabies fixture cycle. Yet university rugby has its own texture: younger squads, improvised training areas, staff working with several sports and athletes balancing classes with demanding schedules. The setting is less polished than a national broadcast, but closer to the daily work behind performance.
Access, context and responsible sharing
A long-term archive is only possible when access is handled with care. Schedules change, photographers need space, and not every moment should be photographed because of who is on the field. The best collaboration includes room for an athlete to decline a request, especially when images concern identity, injury or private grief.
Context also prevents an image from being detached from the event that gave it meaning. Captions can identify the Queen’s rugby setting and direct viewers to the wider collection. The Queen’s rugby archive offers that surrounding material, including photographs that show the team environment rather than concentrating attention on one player.
The archive is copyrighted. Unless a page says otherwise, images should be treated as © Jeff Chan and used personally and non-commercially with attribution. Link back to the original gallery when sharing, and seek permission before commercial reproduction, syndication or sale.
Keep the sequence in motion
The value of photographing someone over four years is cumulative. One frame gives a clue; hundreds create context. My goal with this series is to preserve both the visible performance and the less obvious continuity of character, while accepting that a photograph never explains the whole person.
Editing has therefore mattered as much as shooting. A selection can slow the sequence down, let quiet images stand beside action and avoid an exhausting wall of nearly identical frames. The period guide is only a starting point. The archive itself remains open to interpretation, and each visit can reveal a relationship between images that was not obvious when they were made.
Return to Golden Gaels Photos, search for Julian Eltinge and move through the images in sequence. Share a favourite frame in a family album, club history or classroom presentation with a clear credit to Jeff Chan and Golden Gaels Photos. For commercial use or high-resolution reproduction, contact the photographer for permission. Keeping these photographs visible and properly credited helps preserve the athlete, the teams and the Canadian university sport stories held in the archive.