Sports photography question

[steve B]

Hard to say. I wouldn't mind seeing the other two in the series.

The shadows all look like they're at nearly the same angle, so maybe the same at bat? The pairs also look really similar. Maybe he was holding two cameras and hit the shutter just a bit apart? Hard to tell really.

I know how it was done in the 1980's though. A friend of mine worked in a camera shop that handled film from one of the globe photographers. He used a 3000 shot roll of 35mm and a camera with auto advance. If I remember it right a Canon AE-1. He had a list of assigned subjects for each game and would just hold the shutter down and let the auto advance do its thing when a player on the list was batting or whatever action they wanted that day. A typical game was 5-6 full rolls, so 25-30,000 images he figured at least one would be usable. Milestone games or important games like the 78 playoff or Yaz 3000hit or 400hr were two cameras and more film each.
He also had a good feel for some special things and caught a lot of great stuff that wasn't on the list. Players first hits, or first appearances and minor milestones that were unexpected.

I wonder where all those pictures are now? The Globe only took the ones they liked, I think he said 30-100 per game.

Somewhere I have almost an entire home movie reel I took of Yaz grounding out and popping up I went to something like 12 games in a row and he got hit 3000 the night my parents said enough was enough.

Steve B

[billyb]

Steve,
25 to 30 thousand pics????? Talk about headaches, could you imagine going through all those to find the ones you want to keep. It does sound like he has a lot of great pics though.
I wish I had the rest of the photo, it was the only copy I have. The photo belonged to someone I knew, I will see if I can contact him again. I am researching what photographer took that photo, I have an idea it was VanOeyen, as the photo came out of a collection that had other VanOeyens. I have contacted the Western Reserve Hist. Society, said they will get back to me.

[steve B]

And that's 25-30 thousand per game. Times 81 home games. That's a bit over 2 million just for the Red Sox. Since he worked for the globe he also did all four pro sports, college, plus a few highschool events and things like the marathon and rowing. Probably other stuff too. So figure around 5-6 million photos a year?

Hard not to get a few good ones doing it that way.

[billyb]

Steve,
That seems overwhelming. How many hours does he spend editing the photos to select which ones to use?

[thecatspajamas]

25-30k shots per game?! Yeesh! That sounds basically like shooting high-quality video footage and then just selecting individual frames for printing. That just amazes me, and makes me appreciate the relative scarcity of older photos and negatives even more, especially the earlier ones shot on glass plates.

[steve B]

The guy I knew just worked for the place he got his cameras and repairs and dropped off the bulk film for developing.

Apparently the photographer didn't even have the raw film cut into 3 shot strips like any of us would get, but just got back a bunch of 3000 shot rolls of negatives. Always rush processed, and taken to the globe where he and the globe people would unroll it and look for specific things based on his notes. Once they found the at bat or play they wanted they'd look at the sequence to see if there was a really good one - The ones popular at the time would show the ball just leaving the bat, or just geting there. Once they found a likely segment they'd cut that bit out and have a few small B+W prints run in house. The one they picked would go to the sports dept for editing, and the rest------I don't have any idea what he did with them.

I think my friend said the real important stuff never even went to the lab, but was developed in house by the paper.

I've never heard of anyone else working that way, It's very hard on the equipment and probably on the budget too. My friend never did tell me who it was, just said to pay attention to the photo credits and see who had the most.

The flip side was a photographer I worked for for about a month who would spend a bunch of time setting up a picture then doing some post processing to make it perfect. I spent an entire two days helping him get 4 pictures of his thunderbird ready to send to one of those bargain hunter type magazines. Wax the car, set it up in the driveway just so, wait till the light is "right" 4 clicks over maybe a minute and a half. Then developed. Next day, cropping and printing with a contrast filter to get it looking really good. The contrast had to be bumped up because the cheap weekly want ad always washed out the image. I learned a ton of stuff in a really short time. The other jobs weren't as fun, I spent most of the next week sorting 4 file cabinets of camera gear by how broken it was.

Steve B

[billyb]

Steve,
Great story. I would love to sit in on a conversation, about sports photography, between yourself and some of the guys on this site. I can feel, through your postings, how much you guys care about collecting sports photos.
To me, press photos are the new '52 Topps. Photos are out there to buy, but not for long. At least not the good ones. In time, I can see some of these press photos sitting our your vaults and safes, along side of the Old Judge an T-206 cards.
Again Steve, I really enjoyed your story about photographers and their photos. I just had no idea they took that many photos.

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by steve B

I've never heard of anyone else working that way, It's very hard on the equipment and probably on the budget too. My friend never did tell me who it was, just said to pay attention to the photo credits and see who had the most.

I'll say! Hard all around, but I guess if you were keen to get that one millisecond shot like you say, maybe that's how you had to do it. Hard to believe it would have been worth the added expense unless you were re-selling the same primo image to multiple outlets.

Incidentally, I have heard of some photographers more recently just shooting super-high-definition video and then going frame by frame to select the shots they want. I believe this was for a fashion magazine cover shoot, not sports-related, and all done digitally so that there was no developing cost. Still kind of the same idea as your guy though. I guess it just took technology 30 years to catch up to his methods enough to make it affordable