On Assignment

Snag this QBForce desktop to get pumped for season's start

My good friend Clif Reeder once said it best that the only reason he keeps on taking photos is for making computer desktop background wallpapers. I totally agree with him. Often times, i catch myself taking a certain photo or composing shots in certain ways (wide, landscape) that lend to the possibility of making a new desktop image.

Recently, I’ve given a number of people my images of athletes or teams they’re fans of. This impressed upon me that a lot more people may be interested in some free wallpapers.

So, from now on, i’ll start posting free downloadable desktop wallpaper images whenever I create one for myself. They’ll be collected in the new “Freebies” section of my blog. Take them as they are, i’m sure most of you won’t care much about my choices. Feel free to send me requests though!

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Funny thing as I walked pit road after driver introductions yesterday at the LifeLock 400 at Michigan International Speedway, I come to a car that has a nickname for me. Naturally i had its crew film me with it!

[Watch on YouTube]

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This is my first attempt at a still-to-video documentary-style video from event coverage. Was working the annual auto show in Detroit again this year and since I had great help from Daily photographer and UM student Max Collins, you get to see what we did all day.

Feedback welcome as always on these experiments!

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I’m managing to squeeze some free wifi today and so you guys get to see this funpic from my visit with the world press tour here in Beijing. We were taken to all the major venues of the 2008 summer games and the high light of that tour was a visit to the National Stadium, pictured above. Its still being constructed, so we all had to wear silly red helmets and were forbidden to take any pictures inside….

More to come later when i get more time and internet access!

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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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