On Assignment

Red Wings X-Mas and a little SI Secret Uncovered

Posted in Equipment, SI, Sports, Techniques | Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 | No Comments »

Yes it is Christmas Eve and I’m flying with Santa again on my way home to the padres in the 503.

Since I have to wait for my now 40 mins delayed flight out of the ever inefficient ORD, I thought I’d throw up some festive Red Wings hockey shots from last night.

Santa girls

Datsyuk celebrates his goal in the second

My fav Red Wing trying to score

Also of interest from last night’s game was my education upon how SI got their Red Wings playoff shots from a seemingly impossible angle:

SI did this shot from a really cool angle

It seems those crafty, and influential, photogs from SI got the Joe Louis Arena management to cut a hole in the Zamboni door to the ice rink, slap a piece of glass over the hole, and that’s how the above photo was taken, with a remotely mounted camera:

Cut hole, install glass, perfect mount location!

So simple, yet so utterly exclusive because only SI could get something like that done… i’m hoping maybe i can get access to that some day to try a few shots.

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Not quite video replay…but

Posted in AP, Football, Funny, Michigan, SI, Sports, Techniques | Friday, October 10th, 2008 | Comments Off

So I was going through my raw take from last month’s Wisconsin-Michigan football game at the Big House to edit out some archival images and saw this odd and interesting sequence below. Basically, Michigan quarterback Steven Threet (10) hands off the ball to freshman running back Sam McGuffie (2) and McGuffie gets some yardage until he gets pummeled by a bunch of Badger defenders. Look closely though and you’ll clearly see McGuffie was actually taken down by his own teammate, offensive lineman Stephen Schilling (52)…..

Also, of note is this was the first game I tried the “laying on the ground” technique, where i use my 90° angle finder to get really low-level shots of the action…. thanks SI! (and all others claiming to have fathered the method)

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The new SI issue, with my cover, on newsstands today

Posted in Football, SI, Sports | Thursday, September 6th, 2007 | No Comments »

My cover photo for Sports Illustrated

This is historic indeed. Hopefully not my last cover for Sports Illustrated.

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Funpics from Tigers Home Opener

Posted in Equipment, Fun pics, SI, Sports, Techniques | Thursday, April 5th, 2007 | No Comments »

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.