Funpics from Tigers Home Opener
Monday was the season home opener for the Detroit Tigers, fresh from their AL Title last year. David Bergman, a frequent shooter for Sports Illustrated, let me assist him on the assignment.
I picked him up from his hotel by the airport at 8:30 in the morning and we got to Comerica Park well ahead of the 1pm game time. Always a good idea to be early!
The hope was to capture in a picture the fun atmosphere of the game, possibly large enough to be a doubletruck for SI’s “Leading Off” feature. So, naturally we thought overhead wide-angle was the way to go. Luckly I packed my 15mm fisheye, and had my full mounting gear in the car, so we were able to put up 2 remote cameras in the upper deck–one right next to the TV camera behind homeplate, and the other on the railings in section 323, facing the downtown skyline. My job was to man those two remotes and fire them during the pre-game festivities and a little bit of the first inning. David stayed in the away-team dugout right of home to get all the ground-level action.
Aside from a rather disappointingly lackluster pre-game (no flags over field or anything), the rest of the game went pretty well. There was a flyover after the national anthem, but my mount wasn’t aimed high enough to get it, just the plane’s shadows over the field…
When it came time around the 4th inning for us to transmitt the pictures to SI, I couldn’t get a good enough WiFi signal in the dugout, so I had to haul the laptop up to the press box and transmitt from there. Even with a much faster connection, it still took over 5 minutes per picture because SI demands all shots in RAW, meaning files around 6 to 8 MB each.
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