The Picture Coach

The week leading up to Sundays big game in Miami always makes me think back to one of my best assignments–Covering Superbowl XX. It was 1985, I was a staff photographer at the Providence Journal back then and I had spent a whole month shooting playoff games in New York, Miami and Los Angeles. It was cold, snowy and bleak back home in Rhode Island but I was having a blast on the road. In the end, the Chicago Bears destroyed the Patriots 46-10 in New Orleans but I was living the dream.

It’s hard not to think back to those days and not realize how much easier the game would have been with digital. The superdome, where he game was played was pretty dark with flat ugly lighting. Most newspapers only used black and white pictures at that point and we were forced to shoot at iso 1600. That camera setting only gave us 1/500th of a second at F.3.5. In a real retro move, I pulled out the actual film, grabbed my Schneider 4x loupe and flipped the switch to the light box. Digital has spoiled us with great tonal range that made the film look hard. The combination of the high-speed way we processed the film and the poor lighting made for a grainy ugly result.

At the start of the game, looking up at some of the 72,000 fans I remember this outburst of camera flashes at the opening kickoff. I was pretty nervous in the beginning but I that didn’t last long. The first play from scrimmage was a long pass play to the Patriots Lin Dawson. He ended up getting injured right in front of me and I really mean close. I normally shot action from the sidelines with a 400mm 3.5 Nikon lens along with a 35mm lens on a second body. Remember, the 16-35 zoom was not yet invented so we all used prime lens. The medical staff working on Lin Dawson was so close I had to switch to a 20mm to get it all. My buddy and fellow “Pro-Jo” shooter Bob Breidenbach got a cool frame of me from across the field in the crush of shooters trying to get the picture.

At your average football game you can go pretty much anywhere you want. They do frown on shooters running onto the field but you can travel all 100 yards of the sideline and across the end zone. There is so much media at an event like the Superbowl, they have to provide some order by limiting your access. I remember having a sideline credential that kept me in just one corner of the field. If the action was happening on the other end of the field you couldn’t run to the other end of the field. The Bears were scoring early and often so I spend much of my time photographing the patriots on the sidelines with their helmets off looking defeated.

There were a series of messengers on the field that would collect our film and shuttle it up stairs to the Associated Press darkrooms. Our boss, Chip Maury (See earlier post on H.E.T.) was there to edit our film. He would make a small notch on the edge of the film by the sprocket holes and the AP lab techs would make an 8×10 print for him to put a caption on. It was real madhouse of a place with lots of shouting about deadlines and general craziness. Chip was a former AP guy and I’m sure he felt right at home.

The game went by quickly and it was very late before Bob and I were able to get thought the crowds and hiked up to the upper levels of the stadium to meet Chip. We had no idea if we had made any good photos (remember, no champing with a Nikon F3) but Chip showed us a whole pile of photos that he had transmitted back to the paper, using what was basically just a high tech fax machine. It was New Orleans so there was quiet a party going on as we left the stadium and hurried off to dinner.

This Sunday when the game starts I’ll be watching the sidelines to see what the photographers are doing. Super bowl 20, 30 or 40, film or digital, Nikon or Canon the goal of every shooter on the sideline is still the same. Get great action shots, tell the story of the game and just like the players, have a great game.

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TPC

Yep, that’s me on the sidelines of Superbowl XX throwing my weight around to get a better angle on the play. The action on the sidelines is nothing like whats on the field but there is often pushing, shoving and its not the place for the shy!!!

When I was on staff at the Providence-Journal (Rhode Island), I had a boss who was crazy about getting an H.E.T. on every assignment. For Chip, HET stood for HAIR, EYEBALLS & TEETH. That’s a really tight portrait of your subject that was more than just a “drivers license photo”. I shoot with a Nikon F3 back then (a film camera of course!) and loved the 180mm lens for shooting these photos. I’d have the person in some really sweet light with a dark background and focus in as close as the lens would go and shoot wide opens at F2.8. I was a portrait shooter even back then and I loved to see every wrinkle on that face. Now Chip was both a retired Navy frogman and a former AP photographer so lets just say if he wanted an HET on every roll then that’s what he got. When I started freelancing for the New York Times I was well trained to always get that tight portrait of the subject because it often was the one photo that would get into the paper. After an assignment, I’d eagerly pick up the paper and scream when I’d see what some dim witted editor had done. The headshot in the paper was not my nice clean HET I had shot. No it was a totally different picture. Most likely, it was a wide-angle photo from 30 feet away and had to be cropped 3000%, which looked grainy, soft and just plain ugly.

I was sure everyone that looked at that photo but must have thought I was a really sad photographer…except all the other photographers who had received the same treatment at the old gray lady.

### SR

This picture I made of Quincy Jones while on assignment for The New York Times is one of my favorites and I’d say it would pass Chip’s test of what a tight portrait should look like. I was using an 85mm lens and shot wide open (F 1.8) using Tri-X (that would be film for you new comers) and had him stand near a window so I could get some natural light on that famous face.

Early in my photo career I was a newspaper staff photographer in Florida and one of my favorite assignments was shooting big time college football. We covered Florida, Florida State and Miami games and they always had exciting teams. That’s were I learned the sidelines were packed with guys shooting the long glass but only a few who could get that great shot week in and week out, rain or shine. Faster forward 20 years and little has really changed. Most people can get a decent action photo some of the time but the shooters that were the real deal were few and far between. Rod Mar is “Real Deal”.

He was a sports photographer at the Seattle Times newspaper for nearly 20 years who now makes his living as the official photographer for several sports teams: the Seattle Sounders FC (that’s pro soccer for the soccer-challenged), and the Seattle Seahawks. His photos also appear in Sports Illustrated.

He has just started a new blog called– Eye on the Hawks, (http://eyeonthehawks.seahawks.com) which will be the proof to my earlier claim that he is the real deal. Being the team photographer, he has amazing access and his pictures really stand out.

I wanted to ask Rod something kind of off the wall, something to see how his brain works. So I gave him a theoretical assignment: Imagine you are at a game with only one lens. You only have to bring back just one picture but it has to be great. What lens do you use for capturing that “GREAT” picture. I knew Rod has all the latest gear — Nikon D3s, a 600mm F4, 400 2.8, 200-400 zoom, all the latest equipment. Still, he surprised me with his answer.

‘If I have an entire game to shoot, and I’m going to make one picture that’s memorable, I’m going to take the risk and do that wide angle,” Rod told me. “I think a lot of people with auto focus can run a 600mm, 400mm or a 300 2.8. But the pictures that are special are the ones that are unusual.”

“I’m going to take that wide angle and work the end zones and the sidelines and try to make something really cool within 10 yards of me.”

His use of the term “run” brought me right to my next question. How has modern technology changed sports photography? He answered by drawing an analogy to school. In Rod’s view, auto focus allowed more shooters to take up sports photography. But auto focus alone can only get you so far.

“In the manual focus days there was a big separation between the people who could follow focus and those that couldn’t,” Rod said. “Follow focusing was a skill that made you a great sports photographer along with your ability to know the game and capture moments.”

“So without some skill and practice, manual focus meant pictures that would earn a D- or an F”. Rod said, “Auto Focus has allowed a lot of people to get a C+. The ability to get that “A” grade is what separates the top pros from everyone else. Auto focus is a great equalizer but there will always be that separation. There is a reason why the top guys at SI, the top guys in the world, are still the top guys in the world. Even with all this technology they have just upped their game even further. They are just brilliant, visually, the way they think and their work ethic.”

Maybe there is more to sports photography than 9 frames a sec.

XXX

Here is a photo by USA today photographer Robert Hanashiro showing Rod Mar on the sidelines of a Seattle Seahawks football game with his trusty Nikon 600mm F4 lens. If you have an extra $10,249.95 you can get one from B&H Photo. Anyone (with the cash) can own one but being able to shoot great photos with one—that may take some practice. The lens alone weighs over 11 pounds so you might need to get to the gym so you can run up and down the sidelines with this for three hours a game.

In this photo, Rod has made a very nice clean action shot with the runner and ball visible but the runner was clearly having a rough day.

I got a good lesson in how much photography has changed not long ago, when I went to my local Barnes & Noble to hear Bill Eppridge speak. His book “A Time It Was – Bobby Kennedy in the 60s” had just come out. The book chronicles Bill’s days photographing Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign for president – the campaign that, as we all know, ended fatefully by an assassin’s bullet. Bill had a front row position for that final night and made an amazing set of pictures. The B&N was packed that evening, and everybody in the place wanted to know more about the Kennedys.

Everybody, that is, but me.

After politely fielding one Kennedy question after another, Bills face lit up when he heard my question, the only photo related question of the night. I wanted to know about his iconic picture, the image of Bobby Kennedy on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, moments after he had been shot. My question was this: “How many hours after you shot the picture did you know whether you had gotten the shot?’’

It was just after midnight on June 5th, 1968 when Bill made that shot. He was shooting with a Nikon Nikkormat camera and tri-X film so there was no LCD screen on the back of the camera to quickly check to see if see if he had gotten the now famours picture. This was black and white film so couldn’t just download the pictures onto his laptop and in five minutes know the answer. No, this was 1968 and technology was very different back then. Bill told me he gave his film to a reporter who hand carried it to the Life offices in Los Angeles.

It was around daybreak the next morning, he said, when he got his first feedback on the film. It came from a Time Magazine photographer who told Bill he had seen the contact sheets and said, “I don’t know what else you’ve got, but you have one hell of a picture.”

I wasn’t that surprised to hear it took a full night for Bill to learn what he had. But what did surprise me was something else he said in his talk that night: he mentioned that before the big events of that evening in the Ambassador, he went to his hotel room to pick up 10 or 12 rolls of film. After all, if Bobby Kennedy won the California primary that night, he would have sealed up the Democratic presidential nomination. Bill figured he would need that much film to record a major moment in the campaign. In my head, I quickly calculated the equivalent in CF cards. With my camera, 10 of 12 rolls of film equals about one-8 gigabyte card. I bet if you look in the camera bags of the people covering campaigns today, they would easily have five or 10 times that CF capacity.

It made me think. Technology has never been better, cameras can shoot 9 frames a second and we can make pictures in near total darkness. But I wonder: As photographers, are we making better images or do they just have lower noise in the shadows?

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TPC

Years go when I was staff photographer in Atlanta, we used to joke that a trained monkey could make a good picture of a burning building, flames blazing through the roof or a pretty sunset but it took real talent to make good photos at life’s everyday events.

I was tested at one of those everyday events Saturday and needed to produce a nice set of pictures. It was a party for my friend Cory to celebrate his retirement from the Navy after a distinguished 25-year career. For a photographer these things can be tricky. There was lots of laughing, good food and drinks but the setting was not that visual. All the non-photographers would say what a great location it was, that’s true, but it wasn’t visual. Pro shooters always hope for a location that is so visually loaded it’s easy to make great shots. We call that shooting fish in a barrel but its rare you get lucky so most of the time you’re forced to use your experience and skills with the camera.

Lets breakdown the thing you need to master to make great photos at a party or similar event. Things like this almost always require the shooter to use on camera strobe and that can be pretty ugly if you aren’t careful. I try to use a diffuser on the strobe to soften the light. There are all kinds of these things but I’m currently using the Lightsphere.

Check out some of Gary Fong’s products, such as the Lightsphere that I use here at their website.

When I was in high school, I shot pictures for the school paper and my first “picture coach” was my teacher Mr. Brown. What I didn’t know at the time was he knew nothing about photography but gave advice like he was on staff at the National Geographic. He once told me to always set my camera at F8 and 1/60th of a second. Daylight, nighttime, rain or shine. Didn’t matter–F8 at 1/60th was the answer. Luckily, my Uncle Tom was an amateur photographer and he corrected many of those early missteps.

Fast-forward 35 years and now I’m the uncle doing the picture coaching. My niece, Lilli is the photographer for her High School yearbook and I’ve been working with her on some of those questions we all had when we first picked up the camera. She lives 800 miles away so all of my coaching had been long distance, but that was before I made a road trip for the Christmas holiday.

It was great to be able to sit down in person with my niece and really look over the images she was shooting to make suggestions on how they might be improved. We talked about everything from software to lens selection. She had an assignment to shoot and I was well suited to be her coach. Her school was in a big holiday basketball tournament and this was a great chance to get some really good shots. Back in my newspapers days I shot tons of basketball and even covered the NBA finals a couple of times. Needless to say, I knew my way around the hardwood.

Before I jumped in and started giving suggestions I looked through some football and volleyball pictures she had shot in the fall. From the metadata I could see she had set her camera with a shutter speed that was too slow to really freeze motion.

Looking though the pages of Sports Illustrated you will see a theme to those great action photos. They use telephoto lens, they shoot those lens at the minimum apertures (F2.8) and use the fastest shutter speed possible. Say WHAT??? OK, I’ll put it in simple terms. A good sports shooter will set his camera at 1/500 of a sec and will set his telephoto lens at 2.8. A bad sports shooter would set up at 1/125 at F 5.6. Most shooters agree that you need to shoot at 1/500 of a sec or faster to capture a high percentage of sharp photos. Is it impossible to shoot sports at slow speeds? No, but it is much harder to get a sharp photo. In my early days as a photojournalist many a Friday night was spent at some dark cave of a high school football field. We were lucky to have enough light to shoot at 1/250 of a second. Almost every frame had some subject motion (because of the slow shutter speed) and often you got only one or two usable photo out of 100 images.

To wrap this baby up, I’d say: Don’t get discouraged if you’re trying to shoot basketball. The action is very fast, the arenas are dark and it takes several games to get into the flow of the action. In a controlled setting like a basketball game, move your camera to manual exposure, open your lens to its largest opening and set the shutter speed to the highest setting the lighting will allow. A good shooter will develop a sense of timing for the game and anticipate the action. It takes more than a fast motor drive.

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I was really excited when I saw this photo that my teenage niece made at the game. For me, this photo just screams – GREAT TIMING. Both players are in the air and the blue players arm is straight across with his hand firmly planted on the ball. This is the full frame version of the picture made with a Canon Rebel XSi and a short zoom lens set at 28mm. This is a great example of peak action. Good work Lilli!

Here we have the same action photo but in this version I’ve cropped in to tighten up the picture. As a general rule: tighter is better. I felt the full frame version didn’t add anything to the pictures and just made it harder to read. “Teachable Moment Alert”– I’m not a huge fan of this shooting position. It leads to a lot of “arm pit” photos and haven’t we seen enough arm pits already? By choosing a wide lens you see way too much background and it’s really cluttered. How would I have shot the photo? I’d have used my 50-mm lens and shot wide open (F2) to blur the background. It would have minimized those pesky banners, I could have shot at a high shutter speed and that’s how I like to shoot sports.

One of the fun things about having the camera mounted in a remote location is when you finally see the photos they’re a total surprise. The advance work that Michael put in before the swim meet paid off nicely. There were several strong photos to chose from but I posted my favorite one here. Why did I pick that one? I found this one striking with the bubbling water covering the swimmers head making for a sense of mystery.

While he was setting up his shot, I made a few behind the scenes photos to give you a better idea of how we set up the camera and what we used to keep the gear out of the deep end!

The late afternoon light made for interesting patterns in the water

Out on the end of the diving board one of the major concerns was to get the camera safely attached to the tripod head.

After the camera was attached, Michael had a swimmer do a few strokes so he could fine tune his composition.

Here is a tight shot of the home made gizmo I built to attach the camera to the board. It included a Arca Swiss Monoball head, two “C” clamps, a wooden “L” bracket and a 35 pound sandbag. The 15 feet long gray cable is the way we are triggering the camera. There are two pieces of tape on the lens, what do you think that is for? One pice tapes the zoom at it’s widest setting (16 mm) and the second tapes the focus at 7 feet. This way nothing can accidently giggle our setting, they are “taped down” and can’t be changed.

Talent is important but I can’t help you in that department. As “The Picture Coach” I’d like to point out something that many pro shooters regularly do that is often overlooked–testing. Don’t worry, in all my years of shooting nobody ever asked my SAT score, luckily for me. Shooters use the term, testing, to describe taking out a new piece of gear or a lighting technique and practicing with it. Testing is also a good way to improving the odds of getting the picture you want when you do get the big job.

My friend Michael and I were at a swim meet the other day, not the Swimming Nationals in Indianapolis, just a neighborhood event like many might attend. He noticed they had raised the driving boards up from their front supports, maybe 45 degrees but didn’t remove them from their rear supports. I knew instantly where he was going and liked how he was thinking. For several years he had been shooting swimming and each season his work just gets better. If you want to see swimmers, doing the butterfly stroke with just the tips of their fingers dragging across the water then he’s your guy. Once he’d covered the basics it was time to start looking for more challenges.

While these meets aren’t the big time they still don’t let photographer hang off the diving board to shoot photos. Michael knew I had several cases of clamps, special brackets, various widgets and tripods so we started talking about how to attach the camera to the diving board. The goal was to mount the cameras on the board before the meet started. Once they started swimming, he could fire the camera with a long remote cord from behind the action. We quickly realized attaching the camera was the easy part. The big question became what will his Canon D30 with a 16-35 lens “see” when mounted seven feet off the water.

Michael bravely handed me $2600 worth of his camera gear and watched me slowly walk to the end of the drive board to eyeball the shot. He stayed on the ground to coach the swimmer on what we were looking for. We made a few shots before realizing it looked great with the swimmer right under the board but in a real meet the only thing right under the board will be a blue lane divider. It’s small stuff like that you can only find out when you test. When Michael sets up for tonight’s shoot he will have this problem corrected and be prepared to make great photos. I’ll post more photos of how we mounted the camera and his action pictures later this week.

Here is a test photo I took with the Canon D30 and the 16-35 mm lens, F-4 at 1/1600 of a sec.
Special thanks to Michael Phelps for helping with out test

When I first came up with the idea for “The Picture Coach” I wanted to find a way to get out in the real world to work with students. I liked the idea of hovering over their shoulders to offer suggestions or talk about how I might approach a shoot.
On Saturday night, I was able to try out my idea at a local football game. Yeah, I know some of you are already wondering if I have my sports mixed up. If it’s June and it’s football, then it must be Women Professional Football. Our local team, the DC Divas, had a playoff game, and I was able to give three students a press pass,We spent the whole game on the sidelines, John, Meagan and James to help them understand the finer points of shooting football I was wearing a wireless microphone and I had a video camera pointed at me all night for an upcoming DVD project – an instructional video. It turns out I look pretty good on camera.
A special thanks to Paul Hamlin and Rich Daniel for making that happen!
I’ve posted a few of their photos and will be offering a mild critique with the images.

Ask any magazine picture editor and one of the first things they will tell you is they love to be surprised (in a good way) when a shooter’s work comes in from an assignment. John really got my attention with his first picture. My gut reaction was I wish that it was my image, but I put my battered ego aside to really study the photo. He was shooting with the Canon 300mm 2.8 and he clearly knew how to make great use of that lens. By shooting wide open at f 2.8 and moving in really close, he made cool things happen with that lens. Most of the picture is out of focus—except one very important thing—her right eye. BOOM, he really nailed it.

Magazine photo editors I’ve worked with over the years always have commented when I’ve gone out of my way to give them options. Sometimes it was as simple as shooting the same photo both as a vertical and a horizontal. This won’t work with every situation, but when you can do it, you look like a pro. John gave me options in this action sequence he shot from early in the game. I keep looking at these two images and can’t decide which one I like better. That’s a good problem to give an editor.
In the first shot (with her head down), I love the way the defenders hand is right on her facemask (yes, the ref did throw the flag) and the way the ball is held away from her body. In the second frame, you can see her face, which really helps all sports pixs and there is that great interaction with the arms.
You immediately notice a quality both pictures share—they’re both very clean. When pro shooters use the term “clean” they’re talking about how the background looks, which helps the image jump off the page. In these photos, the background doesn’t have other players, or light poles, or stupid cars in a parking lot. Just blank out-of-focus football field and the action is really easy to see. Again, when shooting the 300mm lens wide open (F2.8) and you really fill up the frame, you can get these kinds of sports photos. Did the photographer ask them to run over where the background is nice and clean so it would make a better photo?—Of course not. But you can be aware of what a “clean background” is and use it when you have an opportunity.

To be a good sports photographer you need to have good timing and you must learn to anticipate the action. Generally, a picture of a quarterback getting ready to handoff the ball is not a keeper. But this image has the defender charging through the line and almost getting to the QB. It’s that big arm inches away from the ball that keeps this photo from the reject pile.

Shooting tethered is a term used to describe hooking the camera directly to a computer using a fire wire or USB cable. You can control the camera from the desktop and get a large preview in seconds. Some camera companies supply the software when you buy the camera (Canon) and for others (Nikon) you need to buy additional software. It’s a pretty simple process but after looking at your camera manual you may need a small amount of help from the usual online resources.

There are lots of places you can get help finding the correct cable but I want to help you in a different way—talk about some of the different ways you can benefit from hooking your camera into your computer.

One of the most common uses for shooting tethered is studio photography. Food and still life photography is vastly improved by using the larger monitor to really see every inch of the scene. The 3-inch LCD on the back of the camera is nice but it can’t compete to looking at your image on a 20-inch color managed display seconds after clicking the shutter.

I like working this way if I’m shooting a portrait for a corporate client. If you are shooting the CEO of Widgets.com nobody wants to wait while you are downloading a card. Shooting tethered, the person who hired me can watch as the pictures hit the laptop screen. Normally, after shooting for a few minutes I look over at my “handler” who is all smiles and I know things are going well.

When I get a new tool, like a lens or a camera with new capacities I like to really give it a workout. When the box of loaner gear arrived from Nikon I wanted to try out their Live View function in a unique way. Live view lets the DSLR cameras operate more like their point and shoot cousins. What the camera sees is displayed onto the LCD on the back of the camera. I combined Live View with shooting tethered to get a dramatic photograph from 15 feet in the air with me “looking “ at the image from the ground via my portable.

Check out my “American Diner” photograph and the video that tells how I did it.

One of my favorite photo from 2009. Nikon D3 and the 14-24 zoom lens. I made the image at F5.6 at 1/40th of a second ( iso 200) but might have shot at a slower speed but the wind was really moving the camera and I was afraid of too much movement.

American City Diner from Scott Robinson on Vimeo.