Flag football practice, Cedar Creek, Texas.
A nice example of what happens when you get some pretty light and come prepared. I’d also point to this photo, taken in the middle of a dusty, dry field in the middle of nowhere, Texas, at 10 on a Saturday morning at a practice for a club-level independent kids’ flag football team as a good contrary example for those budding sports photographers who insist that you need to shoot big-time pro or college events to make a portfolio-worthy photograph.

Mike Danton
Sports Illustrated sent me to Halifax, Nova Scotia to spend a little time with Mike Danton–former Canadian junior hockey star, NHL player with the St. Louis Blues, and… former federal prison inmate. After turning his life around, the 30-year old enrolled at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, where he now plays collegiate hockey. The assignment comprised a mix of game action, documentary reportage, and portrait work over the course of three days, but this is my favorite image from the shoot.

Yani Tseng, 2011 Kraft Nabisco Championship
I wrote a little blog post about this here, but just to reiterate: For about 45 minutes in the morning, as the early groups tee off in the first and second rounds of the Kraft-Nabisco Chapmionshiph, you’ll not find better light anywhere in golf than on the second tee tee box of the Dinah Shore course at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California. Fortunately for me, the pairing and times worked out so that world #1 Yani Tseng came through as the rising sun peered above the trees in the distance, and piped its light straight up the fairway.

Richard Helmstetter
Shot for Sports Illustrated as part of a six-portrait series on innovators in the golf equipment industry. Richard Helmstetter was the creative force behind the Big Bertha, and with it, helped usher in the age of the driver-as-status-symbol and marketing breakthrough–in addition to the more tangible innovations like a bore-through hosel and oversized clubhead. I photographed him at Callaway’s testing facility in Carlsbad, California.

Nelson Cruz, 2011 American League Championship Series
“Chance favors the prepared mind,” Louis Pasteur once said. It also favors the photographer who happens to be in an outside-third base photo well when a right-handed hitting Nelson Cruz walks up to the plate in the tenth inning with the bases loaded in Game 2 of the American League Championship series and delivers a game winning, walk-off, grand slam home run–especially when that photographer makes the decision to put down the 400 mm and shoot loose instead because, well, something exuberant might happen.

Harrison Frazar
PGA Tour golfer Harrison Frazar is one of those middle-of-the-pack guys; never really at the top of the leaderboard but making just enough money every year to give in to the temptation of hanging around on tour. Having gone over a decade without a tournament win, frustrated with his game and sidelined by injuries and painful rehabilitation, he was contemplating retirement when I got to spend a day with him and his family on assignment for Sports Illustrated. One of the most accommodating athletes I’ve ever met, he was generous enough to let me in behind the scenes of everyday life in the Frazar household on a cold February day in Dallas. Later on in June of 2011, he won a tournament in Memphis for a late kick start to his career. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Webb and Dowd Simpson
Golf World magazine sent me to Charlotte to shoot a cover and opener for a feature on Webb Simpson, arguably the best American golfer last season. In addition to portraits of Webb himself, they wanted a shot of him and his wife as well. After trying a few lit portraits, I placed them in front of a window in the grill room at Quail Hollow’s clubhouse. Of late, I’ve early come to appreciate the spontaneity that natural light allows for; usually if you just step back and let your subjects be themselves, without the formality of strobes popping and assistants running everywhere, and focus on your composition and timing, things fall into place.

Hyperwear Ad Campaign
An advertising campaign for a fitness equipment company in Austin, and a shoot that worked pretty much like most of my editorial shoots: A minimum of scouting, art direction and lighting on the fly, adapting to fluid situations, and working within the constraints of a limited location and a tight budget, all while trying to remain relatively unobtrusive and not get in the way of the location’s business or clients. Well, thats the kind of thing I’m used to doing, and that’s the way I’m used to working. My crew (of two) and I set this particular multiple-light shot (1 of 7 different ones we did we did that day, with 5 different models) up in about 15 minutes.

Jack Burke and Dan Jenkins, photographed for Golf World
Jack Burke, the 1956 Masters Champion, is one of my all-time favorite portrait subjects. I’ve photographed him enough times to know that he keeps a leather-bound journal with him, into which he transcribes just about any random thought about golf that comes into his head. It was the basis for a book several years ago, and you can get a good idea for what’s inside of it by just hanging around him for an hour or so; you’re bound to be the recipient of an aphorism or two.

Legendary sportswriter Dan Jenkins, on the other hand, was a bit more intimidating. Even though he and I had worked for the same magazine (Golf Digest) for over a decade, we’d never really met. And I was even more nervous about springing an idea I had for the shoot on him at the last minute–namely, a prop of some Chinese food to make light of a situation he’d gotten himself into with an ill-chosen turn of phrase on his twitter stream last year. He’d got a kick out of the idea, though, and played along to perfection.

Jonathan Byrd, 2011 Deutsche Bank Championship
I’ve written before about how much I like to use mirror lenses on a limited basis, and how to take advantage of the very specific criteria that must be met in order to use them to their full effect. It just so happens that TPC Boston, home of the PGA Tour’s Deutsche Bank Championship, has three out of maybe five or six holes on the entire tour where using such a lens can produce the desired results and give quite a different look from that of a standard telephoto lens. One of those holes is the 17th, where I photographed Jonathan Byrd on the tee in some nice morning backlight.

Ben Crane
A Sports Illustrated feature assignment on a normally low-key golfer who for some odd reason has decided to invent a zany You-Tube persona (the red neoprene suit and crash helmet being the trademarks of that alter-ego), and who also happens to be consistently horrible when it comes to playing the British Open. I hadn’t spoken to him before the shoot, and I was a little nervous about whether or not he’d want to poke so much fun at himself. When he answered the door and asked a) if I’d managed to find a kilt and b) if I wouldn’t mind waiting a second while he went to the locker room to fetch his pink shoes and socks, I knew we’d be having a little fun with things.

Let’s face it, everyone needs a gimmick. There. I said it. You know what I’m talking about. Every now and then someone comes along and is considered “innovative” because they took a fresh approach to something. A tilt-shift lens, perhaps. Maybe a Lensbaby. Infrared. Ring lights. These things go in cycles. There’s really nothing “innovative” about them–they’ve been around for years; in reality somebody just had the good sense to recognize that they were collecting dust on the collective shelf of photography, and they were the re-trailblazers, if you will, who trotted them out. Again. Especially in my part of the business–sports photography–this return to more basic equipment and/or gimmickry, for lack of a better word, is almost necessary if you are to set yourself apart: in this day and age of just about anyone with an autofocus telephoto lens and a digital camera body calling themselves a “sports photographer,” and anyone with a computer and a high-sped internet connection able to disseminate the resultant mediocre pictures and call themselves a “wire service,” we’re always looking for something to make our pictures a little different. Hey, I’m not immune to it, either. So here’s my contribution to dusting off the old equipment shelf: manual-focus catadioptric reflex, or mirror, lens.

I know, I know. Mirror lenses are nothing new. In fact, they’ve probably been around longer than most any other telephoto design. Hell, they’ve been around longer than me. But like tilt-shift lenses and Lensbabies before them, just because people have been using them for years doesn’t mean they aren’t still worth taking for a spin every now and then. But just like those other tools, ubiquitous overuse can make images made using them a visual cliche very quickly.

It’s in this area that the mirror lens has an advantage: unlike some of its other “innovative” counterparts, the physical parameters that lend themselves to the use of a mirror lens are very limiting. That in itself should be enough to prevent their overuse. Anyone can slap on a Lensbaby to shoot an overall of a ballpark, or a tilt-shift during a portrait session, and immediately wind up with something “different” (not necessarily better, mind you, but different…) but the same can’t be said for taking a traditional telephoto off of the camera and replacing it with a mirror. Sure, they’ll give you similar angles of view, depth-of-field, and that compressed, telephoto look, but you won’t be able to achieve the signature effect of the mirror lens that makes it truly different– the “donut” background elements–unless certain physical conditions are met. And with that in mind, here they are:

1. Background: Generally speaking, the higher the contrast and more differentiated the colors therein, the better your chances of creating those rings are. Trees work well, as do crowds. But beyond that, one of the essential ingredients for creating that differentiation is…

2. Back light: The lower, the better, of course, but regardless, the sun coming in from behind the background will create much more contrast between highlights and shadows–and it will also help to separate your subject from the background.. It is that contrast which is necessary for the mirror lens to do its thing. Have a look at the two photos below for a side-by-side comparison of what happens to out of focus elements in back light versus front light. They were taken the same location (the 17th tee at TPC Boston), from pretty much the exact same position and distance (both images are uncropped) on the same day–only the one on the left was shot in the morning, when the sun was behind the player, and the one on the right was shot front-lit in the afternoon. Notice the marked difference in the background.

3. Subject-background distance: One thing mirror lenses have going for them is an extremely shallow depth of field. This makes it very easy to throw the background out of focus–but in order to get the desired effect, the background needs to be way, way out. The farther your subject is from the background, the more pronounced your rings will become. But there’s another element involved with that, and that is…

4. Camera-subject distance: Since depth of field also varies with camera-to-subject distance, it also stands to reason that the closer your subject is to you relative to the background, the better your results will be. Look at the shot of pitcher C.J. Wilson again. I didn’t exactly grab a tape measure, but a good guess (based on the dimensions of a baseball field) is that he’s about 100 feet from my position in the photo well at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington. And (again, an educated guess) is that he’s about 300 feet from the right field stands. That gives us roughly a 1:3 ratio of camera-to-subject-to-background. If you were to express it in graphic form, it would look something like this:

Just right. About a 1:4 ratio of camera-subject and subject-background distance helps the mirror lens do its thing.

Too close: Having your background right up against your subject turns the mirror lens into just another, harder to use and not-quite-as-sharp telephoto with a bunch of weird stuff in the background.

So what happens if you reverse the ratios? Have a look at this golf picture (ignore the front-lit aspect for a moment). In it, my subject is still about 100 feet away, but the trees in the background are much closer–25 feet, at best. The ratio reverses; now we’re at about 4:1, and look what happens to those donuts: Smaller. Much (and pretty much worthlessly) smaller.

And if you were to move the camera say, 250 feet away from the subject and keep him 25 feet away from the background? I can’t show you visually because I never even think a picture like that is worth taking with this lens. The rings are nonexistent.

5. Other considerations: Mirror lenses are, of course, notoriously slow. If you’re heeding the advice above, and back-lighting your subject, you can see where this is going already. Shooting backlit with an f8 lens requires either a low shutter speed or a high ISO, and when you’re shooting action, the low shutter speed won’t cut it.  So the first thing you need is a camera with good high-ISO quality; my exposures for these pictures are in the range of 1/640 f8 at ISO 800 or 1000.

But even at that speed, motion is still going to be a problem. I use mirrors for what we like to call “On-field portraits” a lot, or a wait until there’s a moment where even an athlete seems to stop moving for a brief second. For the action itself, golfers are ideal because they generally keep their heads still at impact, but even some of the best don’t stay completely still. And you’ve still got a 500mm lens in your hands, so camera shake is an issue as well. So it’s also important to either use a monopod or brace the camera on the ground. I like to use a mini bean-bag with a tripod thread for this, as you’ll see later. But no matter what, don’t kid yourself: These things are hard to use, and they’re next to impossible to shoot solid action with. I have an enormous amount of respect for the guys who did it 40 years ago. But if you’re expecting to produce follow-focus, peak action shots with 40 year-old technology that can compare adequately to today’s advanced autofocus lenses, you’re going to be disappointed, no matter how good you are. Don’t overdo it, and don’t overuse it. Save these lenses for situations where they can truly produce something different.

So, putting it all together, what can we glean from all of this? Maximizing the effectiveness of a mirror lens in sports photography (or, in my mind, even using it at all) requires a harmonic convergence, of sorts, of several key elements: A backlit environment, a mottled background, extended subject-to-background distance, and a camera to subject distance that, when coupled with the subject-to background distance, produces a ratio that will yield the desired effect.

That’s pretty much a long-winded way of saying that, in order for a mirror to work, a lot of stuff has to come together. So it’s easy to understand why this lens works in only very, very few situations. Which is a good thing. Because it pretty much guarantees it won’t get overused, relegated to the dust-bin of photography fads that were the “in thing” for about 3 months and then disappeared.. Or at least, we can hope.

The setup:

Left: Carl Zeiss 1000mm Mirotar. Right: Nikkor 500mm f8.

I use two mirrors regularly–a 500mm f8 Reflex Nikkor that’s probably about 25 years old–I don’t know, I bought it used, just as had I bought my three previous ones. They’re prone to fungal infestation, and a lot of the earlier ones were, shall we say, not prone to sharpness, so it’s not uncommon to go through two or three until you find one you like. But at around $200 each on the used market, it’s not really something to worry about.

The Ungainly Beast: Zeiss 1000mm f5.6 Mirotar

The other lens I like to use is a rarity–a Carl Zeiss 1000mm f 5.6 Mirotar that I never even knew existed until I asked Mel Levine, the former equipment stockroom guru at Sports Illustrated, for the magazine’s Canon 1200mm 5.6 one day and, with that unavailable, he offered me this in its stead. I learned very quickly that this was no replacement–it weighs about 60 pounds, is a manual focus lens and, at that, utilizes bellows focusing–literally sliding the camera (and therefore, the film plane) back and forth to achieve focus. My Google research indicated that there were only 23 of these things ever manufactured, with the last one made in 1963. When Mel told me about it, it had been collecting dust in the back of the stockroom for years–with good reason. Nevertheless, I decided to give it a whirl. It redefines the idea of a “limited application” lens. Next to impossible to focus, heavy enough to induce camera shake on the most solid of tripods, and massive enough to warrant its own custom-made wheeled, hard-sided shipping case, this is not the kind of lens you just drag out for a stroll in the park. It’s a lens that requires planning, looking for a single shot and being patient–and being willing to chimp through dozens of out of focus images until you finally get one you’re happy with. Here’s a shot of the Texas Rangers’ C.J. Wilson made with it (and yes, it’s full frame):

As for my camera itself, I’m a Canon guy, so I get a few odd looks when people see a Nikon lens on a Canon body. But the fact is there are far more readily-available Nikon reflexes on the used market, and it’s a lot easier to adapt a Nikon F mount to Canon EF than it is a Canon FD one. If you go to www.cameraquest.com you can price out a hand-machined, glassless F-to-EF adapter; that’s what I use. The other problem to overcome is focus. The stock screens that come with any camera today–Nikon, Canon, whatever–don’t cut it. They’re not really intended for manual-focus applications–at least, not to the extent that their predecessors in, say, the Nikon F2 or Canon F1 (the top-end cameras around back when these lenses were current) were.  You’re going to need all the help you can get; to that end I’d recommend replacing your standard issue p.o.s. focusing screen with one made by Brightscreen. They’re pricey (about $275 or so) but well worth it. My 5D Mark II has one in there for just that reason. Finally, a word or two about sharpness. Now that you’ve gotten your camera dialed in to get the thing in focus, it’d be a shame to lose the shot because of things like flare and/or motion blur–and you;re setting yourself up for both if you’ve heeded my advice and are shooting backlit. So grab some black wrap and gaffer’s tape and improvise an extended hood. And shell out the $25 or so for a beanbag camera support. You’ll be glad you did.

My typical golf setup: Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Angle Finder C, Nikkor 500mm f 8 lens with F-to-EF adapter, beanbag, and a highly technical shade--a piece of black foil taped and shaped to make an extended lens hood.

So there you have it. Mirror lenses in a nutshell. Now get out there, play around a bit, and have some fun with these relics. Just don’t overdo it.

If there are milestones in a sports photographer’s career, I’m pretty sure covering your first World Series would be one of them. I was positively giddy when I got two simple words in an e-mail from Sports Illustrated picture editor Nate Gordon the day after the Rangers won the American League pennant: “You’re in.” After covering countless Rangers games in Arlington over the years, the league championship series both this year and last (and missing out on last year’s World Series because of a scheduling conflict), I was finally on my way to the Fall Classic.

There were four of us in Arlington for the magazine, each with our assigned duties. Mine was to stay in the outfield, between the foul poles, and work on feature and loose compositions for possible opening spreads and covers. I also had an assigned position out in center field from which to shoot straight action; thanks to the ingenuity of Rangers’ PR man John Blake and the perseverance of MLB Photos photo boss Rich Pilling, a new position was created for a couple of photographers with a much lower angle than the regular-season spot at the top of the hill in center. It was a great place to shoot from and yielded some interesting angles on plays in the infield.

I don’t cover a lot of night baseball–during the regular season, unless there’s some overbearing necessity to the game like a feature story on a starting pitcher or something, it’s pretty pointless. It was kind of nice to be able to wander about the ballpark during pre-game, whether it was shooting pictures of the Cardinals’ pitchers throwing long-toss in the outfield as I set up a remote down the left field line, or Rangers’ manager Ron Washington throwing batting practice, and take advantage of the golden afternoon light peeking through the nooks and crannies of Rangers Ballpark that doesn’t normally coincide with game times in Arlington, and it was a real challenge and testament to the high-ISO capabilities of today’s DSLRs (in my case, the Canon Mark IV) to be able to shoot with the necessary long glass (a 600mm f4, with a big assist to the Wimberley tripod head) out in the center field position as that gorgeous light turned to darkness and, as is the case with just about any baseball game where Tony LaRussa is involved, we all settled in for a bunch of very late nights.

Nate and I discussed the picture he was looking for–low angle, wide, yet still a bit from the front if at all possible. Of course, you can’t be out on the field shooting when the players are running on to it, so I suggested mounting the camera on a ballhead, and then on a monopod, and using the monopd as a boom. Just before the Rangers took the field, I extended the monopod and shoved the camera out on to the warning track, firing it with a release cord. The previous day’s rainout had afforded me the chance to go to the park and set my angles, focus, and mark the position where I needed to be to make it happen, so it wasn’t a wasted day. Before the game, Nate told me they were holding the space open for that picture to open the story. No pressure, right? In the middle of the 4th inning I got a text from him telling me the shot was a success and that it was indeed running as the opener. That was a load off of my mind, and it allowed me to relax a bit and get into the rhythm of the rest of the game.

The rest of the game lasted another 3 hours, with the Rangers eventually winning on the walk-off by Cruz. Nate and I had discussed the importance of giving the pictures from the ALCS a sense of place, so I decided to pull back and shoot the potential winning hit loose, using a Canon EOS 1D Mark IV (with a special thanks to Jerry Ward and Bob Malash at Canon USA in Dallas for the loaner!) and a 70-200mm f4 lens. It was way too late to make it in the magazine, but it did get into the iPad edition, which isn’t a bad thing, either.

…There’s one little sentence I want to highlight again, and it’s this:

“Think about it. IF all of those photographers had insisted on getting paid a decent rate to cover those 5,300 games, Presswire would never have been in a financial position to offer such a bargain-basement deal for its pictures.”

That’s the key. The idea that on an individual basis, photographers see their decision to work for free on a limited basis as relatively harmless in terms of the big picture, but in so doing , they don’t realize that that very assumption is precisely what lets the “big picture” work in this case.

Think about it: 5,300 games (U.S. Presswire’s number, from its own press release). For argument’s sake, let’s be conservative and call a “decent” rate $500 per game (commensurate with the standard S.I. day rate). If every shooter who “worked” for U.S. Presswire would have insisted on being paid that amount, that would be a $2,650,000 hole (not counting other overhead) that US Presswire would have had to climb out of just to be profitable. And the only place the company could have made that back was by charging more for its sales and licensing. Basically, then as Allen Murabayashi alluded to in an earlier post, all of the photographers who agreed to work for free just subsidized U.S. Presswire over TWO AND A HALF MILLION DOLLARS to help conduct its operations in 2010.

Now, you might think the three or four or ten games you do for U.S. Presswire every year because you’re sitting around the house and have nothing better to do are pretty meaningless, but look at that paragraph above to put it in context. Find a bunch of people just like you who are willing to do that (and they have), and it all starts to add up.

Look, the people who run the company aren’t stupid–they know a good thing when they see it. When I was first contacted by U.S. Presswire about shooting for them, it was explained to me that they really didn’t have room in their budget/business plan to pay photographers at the time. I found it odd that a company dedicated to the concept of distributing and licensing photographs wouldn’t have a line item in their budget for producing photography, so I, and others, politely declined. But many others didn’t.

And thanks to that stroke of genius–the foresight to know that there was money to be made by many photographers’ desire to be on the sidelines at a big game, to have “major league” sports pictures in their portfolios, and their ambivalence about how much money they made (or lost) doing it or how they got there, U.S. Presswire found its niche, and it found a considerable cost savings. And they can use that cost savings that their photographers have so graciously provided them to undercut other photographers on contracts with their existing clients, and put them in a position to offer unbelievably cheap, sweetheart deals to places like Gannett and other entities with whom they’d like to do more business (or perhaps get bought out by, or maybe purchase a commercial license from) in the future. Who wouldn’t do the same thing, right?

Well, I would like to think that, when it comes to our business, a lot of us wouldn’t. Think back to Robert Seale’s earlier post. Like him, I am constantly contacted by people offering their services for free to get a foot in the door, or to learn, or because they think it will lead to other things. Hell, judging from some of the e-mails I get from well-intentioned young shooters, if I wanted to I could have free assistants for life, someone to do all of my billing and invoicing, and someone to scan, edit, and caption my entire film and digital archive and never have to pay a penny for it. But like Robert, I don’t. Just because the offer is there doesn’t mean you have to take it; and just because there are people out there who are young, or hungry, or naive, or independently wealthy, or who want to help out a “friend” as he starts up his new business (or all of the above), doesn’t mean you have to build your business on their backs.

When it comes to a business arrangement like that, I believe Robert called it “Ethics. Morals. Sleeping at night with a clear conscience.” Some people have it, some don’t.

But hey, what’s done is done. US Presswire has taken full advantage of the situation, undercut people, helped drag down stock prices, and established a national brand for itself, which it has then in turn built into a national network of formerly free, but now just really, really cheap labor capable of churning out photographs of thousands of sporting events across the country at minimal cost. And, if reports are to be believed, it has sold that reputation and network to one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. It will soon have the corporate and financial backing of Gannett, Inc.

If you’re a staff photographer at a Gannett paper? I’d be a little more scared right now. And if you’re an agency or an individual photographer with a contract or licensing agreement with a school, a team, or a league? Have a look over your shoulder. Something’s probably coming up behind you. Something well-financed with a built-in cost structure that you are going to have a hard time competing with.

You have to hand it them. Andrew Carpenean, in answer to my first post, was right about one thing: it’s a hell of a business model.

But again, what it all comes down to is this: They did what you’d expect them to. Not what we hoped they’d do–and trust me, as someone who really looked up to the founder of U.S. Presswire as I was getting into the business, the word “disappointed” doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel about what they’re done to this business and how they’ve taken advantage of many good people in it. I’m no stranger to posting about it, and I’m used to the reactions I get, both from Presswire shooters–who’ve engaged in the basic, expected name calling, to Presswire management, which has made thinly-veiled threats about interfering with my future prospects at places like Sports Illustrated, to threatening lawsuits for “Tortious Interference” if I don’t stop offering my opinion about their contracts and business practices. What I think they’re missing is that while I think they’re business practices are reprehensible, I can’t blame them for taking a gift worth potentially millions of dollars and running with it.

No, the people I’m even more disappointed in are the people without whom they couldn’t have done it. The people who continue to let themselves get taken advantage of week in and week out, whether they see it or not, whether they care about it or not. They are the ones who let businesses like Presswire survive and thrive. We are professional photographers. We deserve to be compensated appropriately for our work. Any organization that does not recognize that is not worthy of our efforts. But no one is going to do that unless we require it. And any photographer who does not recognize that, well, you are indeed part of the problem. The biggest part of it.

If — and I repeat, IF — the numbers in John Harrington’s above-referenced blog post are true, they are staggering revelations about what an utterly shameful deal US Presswire has been offering, and will continue to offer, its photographers–and the lack of business sense, not to mention lack of concern for what is happening in our industry, that you have to have as a photographer to accept it.

To wit: Gannett, a company with revenues of $5.4 BILLION last year, a company which owns 23 TV stations and publishes 83 newspapers, one of which (USA Today) has a circulation of just under 2 million, was given access to the ENTIRE U.S. Presswire subscription feed for…

$1000 a month.

Stunning. Staggering. Pathetic.

And if — and I repeat, IF — photographers got paid for any of those uses, they got about $5.00 per picture.

Stunning. Staggering. Pathetic.

They certainly don’t seem to have gotten paid to actually take the pictures, which explains how US Presswire could afford to charge Gannett only $1000 per month. They managed to find people to cover a ton of games, and didn’t have to fork over any cash for their work product (A 2010 press release pegged their coverage at 5,300 sporting events annually in the U.S. and a feed of 15,000 images per month). All they had to pay for was a small staff and a distribution system.

Think about it. IF all of those photographers had insisted on getting paid a decent rate to cover those 5,300 games, Presswire would never have been in a financial position to offer such a bargain-basement deal for its pictures.

But now things appear to be changing, if Harrington’s information is accurate. Now, photographers will be paid — yes, paid! — to cover games for US Presswire (the implication? They haven’t been paid before.). A whopping $100 per game, inclusive of expenses. Which means now they’ll cover your parking, your gas, and a hot dog, fries, and a coke at the game. Anything left after that (oh, and your insurance, and your equipment payment, and everything else that makes up your daily cost of doing business), you can keep. And you may even get 50% of a sale. But if anyone in the subscription network uses your picture? You get NOTHING else.

But wait, it gets better! Stick with them for another year and… ready? You’ll get a RAISE! Up to $125 per game! Now you can grab a second hot dog and maybe even a beer after the game.

Stunning. Staggering. Pathetic.

I don’t know who should be more ashamed of themselves, US Presswire management or the people who are willing to give away their pictures to them.

And now, good people out in SportsShooter land, I beg you. I WANT to be proven wrong on this. I NEED to be proven wrong on this. The numbers are finally out there. US Presswire’s business practices have been the elephant in the sports photography room for half a decade now, and John Harrington had the cojones to do what so many of us who’d heard the whispers all these many years haven’t ever had the balls to do: he’s put numbers out there in full public view. Honestly, in spite of all the crap I’ve heard about US Presswire over the past half-dozen years, I have always really wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt; I have never wanted to believe that anyone would have the audacity to offer, much less the lack of self-respect to accept, such an incredibly bad deal. So PLEASE, someone come on here and tell me that the information in Harrington’s post, and consequently my analysis of the situation, is wrong.

But do me a favor: No posts about how that thumbnail image in S.I. changed your life, or how cool it is to see your pictures published on someone else’s website, or about how that credential they got you has opened doors to other avenues that normally wouldn’t be available to you, or about how your bank accepted a credit on ESPN.com in lieu of your mortgage payment last month. That warm, fuzzy stuff is not the issue.

When I say I want you to prove me wrong, I mean PROVE it. Look, this is all we know. This is what’s out there. Prove that those numbers are wrong. Prove to me that it DOES make good business sense to “work” for US Presswire; that, in the vacuum of shooting a game for US Presswire (i.e. not taking onto account your “real job” or your other photography work), it is a “good deal.” In this case, it really IS black-and-white. Tell us what’s finally out in the open is indeed wrong. Tell us you’ve been paid to cover games. Tell us what you’ve been paid to cover games. Tell us what you get for that subscription-feed use. Tell us it really does work out positively. Just give us hard numbers to back it up.

I know that right now, there is a US Presswire apologist somewhere who is reading this post, fuming and saying, “Carroll, you ass, do you really think they’d give away the store to a multi-billion dollar conglomerate like Gannett for a thousand dollars a month, like that Harrington guy said? I mean, come on, really?”

And my answer is: Honestly? No, I don’t. I don’t think anyone would be that reckless. Or careless. Or senseless. At least I really, really hope they wouldn’t.

So again, prove it. But don’t just give me the “You and Harrington don’t know what you’re talking about” line. Prove it.

Because otherwise, all that’s out there is the stuff Harrington just posted, which pretty much jibes with the stuff a lot of us have been hearing for years.

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NOTE: This first post was in reaction a piece on John Harrington’s Photo Business News & Forum blog, in which he outlined an (at the time) rumored sale of U.S. Presswire to Gannett.
ALSO NOTE: As of today, over 3 weeks after its writing, not a single person who “works” for U.S. Presswire has responded to my challenge of showing that they have made an actual profit on the games they’ve shot for the organization, in terms of their sales income from a game exceeding their cost of doing business, either publicly or privately. Not a single one. And this from a company which claims to have covered 5300 sporting events a year.

We take comfort in our rituals, and for someone who travels as much as I do coming back to a familiar place the same time every year has a certain enveloping warmth to it. That I’ve covered this event more than any other (and consecutively, at that) makes this the most ritualistic of all my travels. When I was a kid, Labor Day always meant the end of summer, that last weekend at the beach before school started, with fall poised to arrive not long after that. Now Labor Day means a weekend of walking through the streets of downtown Providence every evening, taking in the crisp New England air that has a tinge of autumn in it already–a couple of days ahead of where I grew up down on Long Island, and weeks, if not months, before I’ll sniff that unexpected, welcome scent of fall down in Texas.

So sometimes it’s really refreshing to be on the way out the door to, say, Jake’s flag football practice, and, just for grins, grab a 5D and a 300/4 off the shelf. No expectations, no reason. Just toss it in the front seat and hope for some nice light. Sometimes you get so wrapped up in doing this for a living that it’s really easy to forget about doing it because you love to.

As always, my favorite event of the year did not disappoint. Just the right amount of wind, rain, and cold weather to remind me what tournament golf should be all about. The Masters has its awe-inspiring beauty, the U.S. Open its adrenaline-pumping energy and gravitas, but for raw, grinding golf at its purest, nothing comes close to a British Open. It makes for some rough going for the players, to be sure, but also from a photography standpoint–I was only half joking when I told some colleagues that Royal St. George’s might be the only course that photographs better in crappy weather. The flat, treeless linksland on the Kent coast isn’t much for scenic backdrops, so you have to make do with what you can; adapting to and taking advantage of shifting, sometimes fleeting, light and conditions to illustrate your point and instill a sense of place. Oh, and there was action going on as well, capped off by Darren Clarke’s victory. Following his group all day on Saturday brought with it a very odd side effect: trudging along in the wind and rain in the afternoon, it didn’t hurt to have a few thousand people screaming, “Come on, Darren!” to help keep me going. But enough of that for now. After five straight weeks of golf (not that I’m complaining–just that I’m worn out!) London beckons outside my hotel window, and it’s time to enjoy a couple of days of downtime in one of my favorite cities.

What a week. And I don’t mean the win by Rory McIlroy–incredible as it was–at Congressional Country Club outside Washington, D.C. at last week’s U.S. Open Championship. I mean covering a U.S. Open, but doing it in a different way–for a different client, with a different mindset, and doing it in near-real time.

For the first time, I was working at this year’s Open for the United States Golf Association, which puts on the championship, rather than for one of my magazine clients, which made for a huge difference in how I had to approach the assignment. Images of the event, its surroundings, personnel, and overall environment were just as important as the action going on inside the ropes. With that in mind, I worked as part of a team comprising seven photographers (as opposed to the usual three or four) and seven editors (as opposed to the usual one or two), working a week-long succession of 14- to 16-hour days to create a comprehensive record of the event. Hard work, to be sure, and certainly more physically demanding that a lot of other golf assignments I’ve had. But in the end, well worth it. I couldn’t have worked with a nicer bunch of people, and we all walked away feeling like we had accomplished something pretty innovative, because, well, we had.

Teaming up with the folks at Canon, who armed us each with a couple of EOS 1D-Mark IV cameras equipped with WFT-E2A wireless transmitters, all seven photographers were able to transmit from the course over a 4G network, using the camera’s “Set” button to send images from anywhere on the course to the editors back in the media center. Coupled with a platform created exclusively for the USGA by IBM, we were able to post, in what we liked to call “near real-time” images about 5 minutes after they were taken, in a synchronous time line on the USGA website each day. Pretty cool stuff indeed; to our knowledge nothing of this magnitude had been tried at an event like this (not to mention over distances like this), let alone with as much success as we managed to achieve. I was proud to be a part of it.

One more thing, as a sort of “by the way” item. You’ll notice in my main gallery above that there’s a dearth of pictures of guys actually playing golf. I know. I meant to do that. But every now and then I’ll get an e-mail from one or two (of my three or four) readers asking why I don’t show more “normal” golf pictures. We have a nickname for those–we like to call them “neck and steel” pictures: stuff that’s pretty much de rigeur out there for someone who shoots golf day in and day out. In so doing, though, it can be easy to miss the forest for the trees, and eliminate the obvious. So while I’m still reluctant to intersperse things like that in a “best of” type gallery of images, I’ve put a few of my favorites from last week down below.