Just in time for the Summer Olympics, Resource Magazine's newest edition features a profile of Bill and his sports photography over the years. In the interview, Bill discusses his influences, favorite things about shooting sports, and tips for starting photographers. The Resource Magazine Summer 2012 print edition is now available.
Eugene is one of my favorite towns. It is easily the best place to watch Track and Field in the United States. Large, enthusiastic and knowledgeable crowds for every event. Wonderful.
On years when the Olympics are held, there's a special excitement and tension at the track.
For our SI coverage this year, we wanted to give audiences a behind the scenes experience as well. Everyone wants to see the finish line photos of course, and we have those, but the stories behind the races and at the stadium are part of what make this event so special. Our coverage of this year’s events is featured in stories online, in the magazine and on the iPad edition, with galleries and in the leading offs.
When Allyson Felix and Jeneba Tarmoh tied in the 100 meter race, we created a video of Roger Jennings, head photo finish evaluator, describing what he looks for in the photos and how he makes the call.
Outside the track, the legacy and career of Steve Prefontaine continues to impact new generations of runners and track enthusiasts. With the beautiful words of our friend and SI writer Tim Layden, Laura and I created a short video "An Hour at Pre's Rock." The video was shot as stills using the iPhone and put together with the new Aperture 3.3 to show the emotional pilgrimage people make to his memorial.
Last week, we spent 48 intense hours in Boston making a short film about the thinkers of the New Media Consortium. Every interview turned into a wonderful conversation, with such a great group of minds to listen to and learn from. Authors. Auteurs. Filmmakers. Musicians. Educators. Photographers. Historians. Librarians. Scientists. We asked each person who sat for us to expound on one central topic - Ideas that Matter. We worked in a hotel suite in Cambridge. The room was approximately 20 x 18, with 8 foot ceilings. The entire length of the room featured large, uncovered windows, which we promptly covered with blackout curtains.
Our main light was an Arri 2K that we put through a triple baffled and grided Chimera Quartz box. Gorgeous light. We used Chimera triolets with various boxes for the accent lights. We turned the air conditioning off to keep the sound clean, and the lights, are, well… they are called hot lights for a reason. Not to put too fine of a point on it the room was very quickly scorching. So hot in fact, that when my friend Don Henderson came into the room he announced in his unmistakably Texas style that it was so warm that he saw the Devil running out the door looking for air conditioning.
We shot the entire piece on Nikon DSLR's. D4's and D800's. Taking advantage of the clean HDMI out we saved hours by letting the machines do the transcoding for us. We recorded the entire audio session on four recorders. Backup, and more backup. Four cameras running constantly. All in all, a lot of data.
As always, our friend Bob Trikasis came through with a networking solution that allowed us to make maximum use of our computer power and ultimately got us through just in time.
Ideas that Matter is now available on iTunes U.
Bill's latest course, Career & Lifestyle Portraiture, is now live on KelbyTraining.com. In the course, Bill goes on location with subjects to show how to create unique images that instantly tell a deeper story about the subject. Learn tips and techniques for creating simple, yet elegant portraits of people in a variety of lifestyles and careers, both indoors and out.
We are excited to announce that Bill will be presenting at ProFusion 2012 in Toronto on June 19. As Canada's pro imaging technology expo, ProFusion brings together professionals in the industry and hundreds of vendors to provide the latest training and technology. Bill's seminars, A Life-long Love Affair with Photography and Moving Seamlessly Between Stills & Video, will be taught at 9:15 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. on June 19. Space is limited. For full descriptions of each seminar or to sign up, please visit profusionexpo.com.
If you're in Toronto, we hope you stop by!
This May, Bill did an interview for The Candid Frame: A Photography Podcast episode #139. He discusses the photo industry, his inspirations, his childhood, and what it takes to stay competitive. The forty minute episode can be streamed now from their Web site.
Driving through the countryside of Iceland is a time warp to a land before time. The landscape is rough and barren. Its moss covered lava fields and tall sloping mountains have an almost lunar appearance.
This is 66 degrees north. The home of seals and poets.
A few years ago, we produced a multimedia piece on Australia for the launch of the Nikon D3s and rolling through the southwest Iceland felt so much like our time in Tasmania.
Bill and I were lucky to be escorted through the Snæfellsnes peninsula of Iceland on Sunday by our new friend Raymond Hoffmann.
He works with Dionys Moser, a Swiss photographer who is famous for his landscape work.
We will be joining them on some tours in the near future -- a diverse selection of locations from the north of Norway for the Northern Lights to the White Desert of Egypt to the Blues country of the Mississippi Delta. We will have dates and descriptions posted on our blog and their Web sites soon. Raymond was born in Germany, but moved to Iceland after meeting his wife - a native Icelander - on a trip to the island 10 years ago. He took us to spots the guide books never mention. A black rock beach, a cozy ocean front hotel for a gourmet lunch -- lost on Bill, but much appreciated by me -- and small waterfalls overlooking a breathtaking backdrop of Church Mountain.
We started the day with coffee and croissants with his wife and 2-year-old daughter. Along with spending hours talking with photographers at a lunch graciously arranged by Baldvin Einarsson, this was easily the highlight of our trip. As much as we love taking pictures, spending time with people and making new friends is the best part of our existence.
Baldvin runs a professional camera store in Reykajavik. A really professional camera store. It was a another step back in time for us. Along with our friends at the Camera Store in Calgary, and Light and Byte in Zurich, Becco is a wonderful throwback to when service mattered most. It’s just a different way to shop, and learn.
We’re lucky because we have Jeff Snyder and Annie Cahill at Adorama in NYC who are long time friends and colleagues. We can’t drop in often and hang out with them -- it’s a bit of a commute --but they give great small town service with huge national resources.
The weather Sunday was perhaps less than desirable for most tourists but, as Raymond pointed out, typically Icelandic. The temperature wavered between 0 and -2 degrees Celsius, and the wind was a blustery 30 meters per second, which translates to just over 60 miles per hour. We spent the day driving along the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, unable to see the famous Snæfellsjökull volcanic glacier due to clouds, but enjoying the scenery nonetheless. We stopped to watch a family of Icelandic ponies graze in a rocky field. We made pictures of a small church in the center of a lava field. Raymond took us to the famous beach at Búðir where we watched snow fall on its one-of-a-kind round, black rocks, a jarring yet phenomenal scene.
We ended the tour in a small fishing town where we warmed up with a bowl of homemade vegetable cream soup before driving back to Reykjavik. As the sun set behind a wall of clouds, rays of light escaped, allowing us to make the last of our Icelandic photos.
Maybe we’ll make it back there someday. There is still so much more to see and do.
This is one place I’d like to get back to on a sunny day. It’s called Gullfols, or Golden Falls, and pictures from there are spectacular when the weather is nice. I shot this using the 8mm app on my iPhone just for fun, trying to make light of a dark day.
But there is a lot of work to be done this weekend at the Preakness Stakes so after a quick stop in Norway, home we go.
Any place where more than half of the population believes in fairies, and where they advertise themselves as the land of seals and poets--yet the landscape and people are incredibly reminiscent of the best of the American west--is a place I can't help but love. Great music on the radio didn't hurt my mood either, nor did the excellent coffee. Outside of Portland, and maybe Seattle, why doesn't the USA have the same wonderfully prepared coffee I always find in Europe? Sure, most US cities have a great coffee shop, but you have to search for it. Here, it's everywhere.
The land is gorgeous. Geysers, snow covered mountains and beaches within sight of each other.......not to mention the delicious thermal spring baths. Peter Brodin from Nikon Nordic took us straight to Blue Lagoon Wednesday after we got off the plane - the perfect way to relax after a long journey across the Atlantic. The warm water coupled with the chilly air and shocking landscape was refreshing in an uncommon way.
Then yesterday Laura and I took a road trip east to Geysir - a small town about an hour and a half outside Reykjavik that consists of a gas station, a motel and the world's largest geyser. Geysir, the geyser (they are clever with names here) has not erupted since 2000, but when it does it is twice the size of Old Faithful in Yellowstone. However, a smaller geyser 50 yards away called Strokkur erupts every 8 to 10 minutes and, unlike Yellowstone, Laura and I were the only people there to enjoy it. Watching something like that is like watching the world begin. It's beautiful in a primordial way.
After the sweltering heat, and the intensity of the Kentucky Derby, the chill air and thermal hot springs of Reykjavik have been an extremely pleasant salve.
Just the right tonic to revive me before I head to Baltimore to continue to document the quest for a horse racing triple crown at the Preakness Stakes.
My name is Curt Bianchi, and I'm guest blogging for Straw Hat Visuals today. In my real life, I'm a software engineer at Apple, but once a year I play sports photographer as part of Bill's Kentucky Derby crew. This is my sixth Derby with Bill, and I thought I'd share some behind the scenes insights into the making of Kentucky Derby photographs.
While the Derby is known as "the fastest two-minutes in sports," for Bill it lasts most of a week. He typically arrives at Churchill Downs on the Tuesday before Derby Day. This is by choice. One thing you don't see too much in the magazine is how much Bill loves to photograph the entire Derby experience, from the barns and exercise riders to the fans and their hats. The Derby is perhaps without peer among American sporting events in terms photographic opportunities, but you rarely, if ever, see Bill's non-race work featured in print. The advent of DSLR video and post-production software like Apple's Final Cut Pro changed the game, providing Bill and Laura with the tools to create multimedia pieces for SI's Web sites. These pieces are an ideal outlet for incorporating all of the creative elements that make the Derby such a compelling event for Bill and Laura to cover.
Racing at Churchill Downs is an all-day event, with 11 or 12 races stretching from late morning to dinnertime. That means exercising the horses on the track takes place early, starting before dawn. Bill's usual routine is to be out of the hotel everyday between 4:30 and 5 a.m. in order to shoot the activity on the "backside," the area where the barns are located. Bill has shot the backside for something like 28 years, and he never gets tired of it. There is a tremendous amount of activity here, with more than 40 barns packed into a fairly tight space. It also feels intimate. Horses, exercise riders, hot walkers and trainers are everywhere, and the sunrise brings ever-changing light. As Bill said in an earlier blog post, it's "peaceful and beautiful; tranquil, but exciting." It's a great place to be a photographer. Bill loves to wander the backside with a 400mm lens, and he's a master a picking out details with it.
Serious preparations for the Derby itself begin on Friday of race week with the marking of spots. After the morning training session is done, all of the photographers from the various press agencies get together on the "frontside," where the grandstands are located. Spots are marked along the finish line, on both the inside and outside rails. There is a pecking order for this. The Churchill Downs official track photographer gets first choice, followed by the major media outlets such as SI, Associated Press and Getty Images, the great local papers --The Louisville Courier Journal and the Lexington Herald Leader. The spots are small, usually 18 inches to 3 feet wide.
Once the spots are determined, cameras can be installed.
This year, SI covered the race with three photographers: Bill, Heinz Kluetmeier, and Gary Bogdon. Bill always covers the first turn and the finish line. This is a lot of territory, encompassing a bunch of angles, so Bill installs upwards of 30 cameras to capture it all. Obviously, he can't be in all places at the same time, so most of the cameras are pre-composed and focused by Bill and fired by assistants. A few others are handheld by other assistants.
Bill places a dozen cameras under the inside rail, just after the finish line. These cameras -- equipped with lenses ranging from 14mm to 400mm lenses -- give the perspective of horses running nearly on top of you with the grandstands in the background. Other cameras are clamped to stands 1/8 of a mile ahead of the finish line, providing a higher perspective of the race. These have wide angle lenses and are mostly composed to directly face the grandstands. All of the cameras are wired so that they can be fired remotely, as the photographers here have to stand some distance away from the rail in order to avoid creating distractions for the horses. Another set of cameras is placed on the roof of the grandstands. These give you the sweeping shots of the fans and the track. With the Derby run late in the day, the lighting is usually gorgeous for these shots. After Bill composes and pre-focuses everything, the cameras are then "bagged" with plastic bags in case it rains before Derby time and to keep the cameras protected from dirt and moisture during the day while the racing card takes place and the grounds crew prepares the surface.
The last set of remotes are installed on the outside rail of turn one. Which brings me to my job at the Derby this year… In the past, I've handled what I would consider non-essential shots; that is, shots that wouldn't seriously detract from the overall shoot if they failed. One of my favorite Derby memories is from two years ago. It was raining on race day and in the afternoon Bill got the idea to install a camera under the rail to shoot the horses' hooves close up, splashing in the mud for a multimedia piece. I took the equipment out to the location where Bill planned to meet me to set it up. But he got delayed and sent me the text, "Can't get there. Do what you can. Good luck." This was my first time using a pocket wizard -- something you wouldn't ordinarily use in this environment -- but with Andy Hancock's help, we got it all working.
This year, Bill upped the ante, asking me to man turn one. Turn one is the location for one of the most iconic shots of the Derby -- the pack of horses rounding the turn with the Churchill Downs twin spires in the background. Bill sets up turn one with three pre-focused, pre-composed cameras: A mid-range lens to capture the spires, and a 300mm and 400mm to come in tight on the horses rounding the turn. These are all wired together so that they can be fired with a single remote trigger. An assistant --my wife, in this case -- only has to push the button at the right time. Sounds easy, right? But there's also the problem of exposure, which cannot be pre-determined because of the changing light conditions. For instance, last year it rained all day, right up until a minute before the horses left the starting gate, when the sun came out. It made for incredible images with mud flying everywhere, but it was a scramble trying to get exposures changed. Not only that, we shoot the horses "twice around," meaning the light could be different from one time to the next. For the inside rail shots, last minute changes aren't possible because the assistants have to be off the rail around race time, so you do the best you can.
In addition to the pre-composed cameras in turn one, I was assigned to shoot a handheld 600mm. Now, let me just say right here that I've never shot a 600mm lens, so the prospect of getting tightly composed and properly focused shots of horses running past me at 35 miles per hour or so seemed a bit daunting. But like I said earlier, there are races all day long, so I practiced.
In between all of the set up and preparations, Bill also finds time to shoot the fans and what he calls "feature work." Not much of it will find its way into the magazine, but this kind of shooting is one of the reasons Bill keeps coming back. One of the best places to shoot fans is from the paddock where the horses are saddled and the jockeys are mounted before each race. It is packed with spectators, and Bill can use his 400mm for tight crops and shallow depth of field. He also finds time to wander the infield, which is a completely different world from the grandstands. All in all, Bill's days are packed and sleep is in short supply. The same goes for Laura, who in addition to capturing audio and video at Churchill, does most of the post-production work and all of the video editing.
Finally, race time approaches. For me, the Derby is both exhilarating and nerve-racking. My wife and I got to turn one about an hour before the race in order to be there before the horses are lead from the barns to the frontside and into the paddock through a tunnel in the stands. Bill made one last check and set exposures, but there's still plenty of time for the light to change, and of course, it does. My main job is to stay on top of the exposures of the pre-composed cameras and shoot the 600mm handheld. I was so pre-occupied with the light that I completely missed the horses coming out of the paddock and parading in front of the stands before being lead to the starting gate at the far end of the track.
Once the horses are off, they are on top of you quickly and you've got about a five second window in which to shoot in turn one. The long lenses are shot wide open, so depth of field is extremely limited. I absolutely could not have shot that 600mm on manual focus while tracking the horses. Today's auto focusing cameras and lenses are a boon to photographers, dramatically increasing the success rate of mere mortals such as myself. And even then, it's not that easy. Back in the day when Bill came up, everything was manual focus, and the ability to focus long lenses on rapidly moving subjects separated the men from the boys. It's one of the essential qualities that have made top notch sports photographers such as Bill and Heinz Kluetmeier so successful. For the Derby, Bill shoots a 600mm handheld from the outside rail about 70 yards past the finish line -- he still shoot manual focus so that he can compose the way he wants quickly. He shoots the horses all the way down the track coming toward him, but most often the money shot is a tight one of the winning horse passing the finish line and the jockey celebrating. That's the shot that made the cover when Calvin Borel won aboard 50-1 longshot Mine That Bird in 2009.
After the race, it's a scramble to get cards back to the media room so that they can be copied onto computers and uploaded to the magazine's offices. The Nikon cameras Bill uses have two card slots which can be configured so that each shot is written to both cards. This enables Bill and Laura to give one set of cards to SI's Photo Operations Manager Erick Rasco while keeping another set of cards for their use in prepping another multiple piece. Erick is so calm, friendly and fast when he is on location with the photographers it makes an incredible difference.
We also have to clean and pack all of the equipment. This may seem like an afterthought, but cleaning and packing is extremely important and is not taken lightly.
You are talking about a massive amount of fragile and expensive gear.
We typically use wet wipes to clean off the equipment. Fortunately there was no rain on race day so the cleaning part was easy this time -- we finished it in about three hours.
When all is said and done, we got out of the Downs at around 10 p.m., time enough to get back to the hotel and order pizzas for everyone and a night of post-production editing.
My thanks to Bill and Laura for another great Derby. I had a great time, and so did the backup (or is it primary?) brain.
The multimedia "Beating the Odds: The 138th Kentucky Derby" is now on SI.com
Tomorrow is the big day. The 138th running of the Kentucky Derby. Laura and I arrived in Kentucky on Tuesday to get settled in, and to start work on several multimedia pieces.
We’ve been at the track every morning by 5 a.m. It’s my favorite part of this event.
Dawn on the backside of Churchill Downs allows me to make beautiful pictures at a slower pace. It’s peaceful and beautiful. Tranquil, but exciting.
But I don’t come to the Derby just for the horses. I come for the people.
I’ve been covering this event for more than two decades, and through the years I have made some of my closest friends here. People like Bill Luster, Dan Dry, Matt Goins and Skip Dickstein, just to name a few, are the main reason I wouldn’t miss the Kentucky Derby.
The Run for the Roses also gives a chance to catch up with colleagues, like SI senior staff writer Tim Layden. He is a wonderful writer and great friend. Working with him is always a pleasure.
He was the subject of our first multimedia piece, a multi-camera stand-up where he gives viewers his picks for this year’s race.
Our second multimedia is a backstage look into the making of champion race horses and the beauty of the Derby.
Stay tuned for more....