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| © Max Morse |
| Peter Reed Miller at Superbowl XLI. Click photo to see a slideshow of Peter Kolonia's photos from Super Bowl XLI. |
As the opening kickoff of Super Bowl XLII spirals over the University of Phoenix stadium on Sunday, February 3, you might think the most exciting action is exclusively on the gridiron.
Not for photographers.
Just off-field, sports shooters and their assistants will dash upfield and down following the plays. Runners will rapidly ferry memory cards from sideline DSLRs to the nearby media trailers. There, images will be transmitted almost instantaneously to the home offices of the Associated Press, Getty Images, Reuters, Sports Illustrated, and other news organizations.
The goal: To be the first and fastest to deliver images of the game to their print- and web-based clients -- and the world. This intense off-field action carries with it potential rewards just as significant as those of the big game itself.
"At the Super Bowl, all the photographers are trying to get their pictures out first," explains Gary Hershorn, News Pictures Editor of the Reuters wire service. "AP, Getty, and Reuters all take the Super Bowl very seriously. A 30-second lead can make the difference between your picture ending up on MSNBC's home page and someone else's."
To cover the Super Bowl, the major news services may field as many as 12 to 15 photographers, four in each end zone and two on each sideline who roam with the action. Two more shooters work from the stands for more elevated views.
Their digital cameras, almost exclusively Canons, are technical marvels -- but in some ways make the job tougher. The latest EOS DSLRs capture more pictures at faster framing rates, with higher burst capacities, and the images have much larger file sizes than before due to the ever-increasing resolution of the EOS sensors.
Media conglomerates such as Time Warner (the parent company of Sports Illustrated) need both easily transmittable JPEG files, and also full-info RAW files that can deliver the highest image quality possible for poster, merchandise, and even billboard-size use down the road. This dual system, JPEGs and RAW, greatly complicates the job of transmitting images out of the stadium to a waiting public.
Greg Choat, deputy picture editor for technology at Sports Illustrated, expects the amount of pure data flowing from the sidelines of this year's Super Bowl to be double that of last year. "RAW files from the Canon EOS-1D Mark III, at 15MB, are nearly twice the size of those captured by the Mark II n's we used in 2007," he says. "And with a maximum framing rate of 10 fps, the 1D Mark III will produce nearly twice as many of them."
So how do the news services cope with ever-greater numbers of ever-larger files? First, they deploy their photographers as efficiently as possible. Peter Reed Miller, an SI shooter who has covered more than 30 Super Bowls, offers an example of this efficiency: "All Sports Illustrated shooters use the same system for dealing with memory cards," he says. "We have clear plastic cases that each hold four cards. If the cards are loaded face-down, they're used; face-up, they're clean. Runners don't have to actually speak with the photographers, but they immediately see which cards go back to the trailer for downloading and transmitting."
Second, editing has gotten more efficient. In past Super Bowls, SI's director of photography, Steve Fine, and his assistant would look at some 20,000 images during and immediately after the Super Bowl. This year, because of the Mark III's increased framing rates, Fine expects to be editing well in excess of that 20,000 figure.
At the opening kick-off, Fine and his staff typically sit back and join the rest of the country, watching the game on network television. When the first important play goes down, his runners spring into action, collecting the (usually) 2-gigabyte CompactFlash cards from any photographer who had a clear view of the play. Within minutes the cards are dumped, duped, "washed," and redeployed (that is, downloaded, backed-up, reformatted, and returned to the photographers).
As a card's contents are uploaded to the system, the images are automatically tagged with the date, stadium, photographer's name, names of the teams, and the photographer's "X-number" indicating his or her field position.
"We edit almost in real time, while the play is still fresh in our minds," says Fine. He and his assistant view files rapid-fire, first separating out a set of Roughs (about 450 shots per game) and then winnowing down to Selects -- about 100 action, and 20 "color" shots (halftime, celebrities, players on the sidelines, etc.) per game. In 2007, only the Selects were transmitted back to the magazine's office in New York.
Fine, who will be covering his 22nd Super Bowl this month, says, "As fast as I can hit the 'Next' key is how long it takes me to edit."
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