Armed with two new digital cameras — the Nikon D1-H and the Canon EOS 1D — as well as high speed wireless Internet access, photojournalists are going digital for Super Bowl XXXVI and the 2002 Winter Olympics.
“We going with a fully remote editing system from Salt Lake City, Utah,” said Gary Hershorn, Reuters news editor/pictures for the Americas. Two picture editors will work on location, filing the work of eight photographers to the Reuters FTP server, said Hershon. With the help of four images editors, Herson will conduct the “master edit” of all the photographs.
Garo Lachinian, director of photography at the Boston Herald-American, will apply a similar approach and remain in Boston as images from his five staffers arrive by way of a high speed DSL line.
Gary Hairlson, assistant director of photography at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, lead Super Bowl coverage for the second time in three years. “We are all digital this time — no film,” Hairlson told Poynter.org Saturday. “This just makes more sense. It is a lot less equipment to carry, which is of real value with the security being this tight.” Using Canon EOS 1D cameras, the Post-Dispatch photographers will file their photos via DSL.
Although new technology abounds at Super Bowl XXXVI, some organizations are relying on methods perfected in previous years. “The fast transfer rates these days are more than acceptable, so we are doing things the tried-and-true way — some might [say] old fashioned,” said Jim Wilson, assistant director of photography at the Boston Globe. “We are using the analog South Western Bell telephone lines — four of them, to be exact. This is somewhat the same drill that we followed in the 1997 Super Bowl,” Wilson said Saturday.
Like most photo teams, the Globe used a mixture of Nikon D1-H and Canon EOS-1D cameras to capture the action.
Steve Fine, director of photography for Sports Illustrated, said that because SI is a weekly publication he feels less pressure to finish photos fast. “Digital is not working for us consistently; we will be using [Fugi] film,” said Fine. Fine added that SI photographers, “prefer the file from the D1X,” but in the “slow buffer, speed is an issue.” All agree that the new line of professional digital cameras work well in daylight and controlled lighting situations (strobes), but not Dome football.
The Associated Press’s editing operation was to include no film processing at all, according to Mike Feldman, senior editor/sports. In Feldman’s first Super Bowl as senior sports editor, the AP organized its staff into three teams. Each team has an editor, an imaging technician and a couple of photographers. Feldman said on Saturday that he would supervise the final edits and the publishing of photographs for members via the Web.
Doug Parker, director of photography at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, said that tight security made it easier to install high speed DSL lines for filing photograhs this year, instead of hiring motorcycle messengers as in previous years. Shots were taken with the Nikon D1-H.
When asked on Monday morning, Parker reported that the results were “smooth as silk.”