Four cities, four covers, one photographer

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|| SportsShooter.com: News Item: Posted 2010-08-23

Four cities, four covers, one photographer
Sports Illustrated staff photographer Peter Read Miller photographed regional college football preview covers in Idaho, Ohio, Texas and Alabama.

By Peter Read Miller, Sports Illustrated

Photo by Peter Read Miller / Sports Illustrated

I recently completed shooting the Sports Illustrated college football preview covers. Since the magazine is printed at a number of printing plants located around the country we are able to produce regional covers for this issue. The four schools we chose this year were Boise State, Ohio State, Texas and Alabama. I was accompanied on the trip by Shawn Cullen and Max Morse. Shawn was my first assistant and Max helped out as well, but his main job was shooting video of the shoots for SI.com and our iPad edition. We also used local assistants in each location. You can see the video here: http://tinyurl.com/sicovvid

I have shot the college football preview covers for the past five years. Each year we have chosen a different position or grouping of players to shoot. This year it was three defensive players from each school. Because I usually have very little time with the players and because it is important to have a pose that will work well and can be consistently replicated from school to school I now do a full test shoot before going out on the road to shoot the real thing. So I rented a large conference room at a hotel, Shawn and I set up all the lighting gear, I brought in three more assistants (and friends), dressed them in rented uniforms and started shooting.

At first it seemed that we were looking at a rather boring three shot. Then an idea occurred to me that Steve Fine (SI's Director of Photography) and I had tried last spring when I shot three USC Linebackers who were all slated to go high in the draft (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/cover/featured/11210/index.htm). This was the lunging shot that we came up with. For whatever reason it didn't work with the SC linebackers, but in the test shoot it really looked good. I was kind of like, "this is what that shot should have been, but hey-let's use it now."

Sports Illustrated staff photographer Peter Read Miller photographs one of the regional college football preview covers.

Most of the gear I used for the shoot was pretty much my standard set up: the Canon EOS 1-Ds Mk III, Canon 24-105MM F4 IS lens and Dynalite strobes. One new and exciting piece of equipment I had to work with was the Lenovo Thinkpad W510 laptop. Whenever I'm in a lit portrait situation I shoot tethered using Capture One V5 to ingest, then I back everything up immediately on a WD Passport portable external hard drive. The W510 is definitely the best laptop computer that I have ever used for this type of work. Not only is it rugged and powerful, but it has a number of really cool features aimed directly at photographers.

First the basics: my W510 has an Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB of ram, a 500GB 7200 rpm hard drive (SSDs are available) and I'm running Windows 7 64-bit. It has a DVD/Blu-Ray reader/burner and a bunch of ports including 2-USB 3 and 1-eSATA. It has an 5 in 1 Multi Card reader (no CF) and built in AT&T cellular (activation required). The display is amazing- 15.6 Full High Definition 1920x1080 pixels, it shows 95% color gamut. It is sharp and it is bright. The display is also a touch screen-more about that later. Another cool feature is the built in Pantone huey PRO X-Rite Colorimeter. You just start up the software and close the lid and in about a minute your monitor is calibrated. All this in a package that weighs under 7 lbs.

So we have a super powerful laptop with a lot of neat features, but what really makes it work for me is the touch screen. The covers were shot from a pretty low angle-maybe 12" of the ground-as are most of my portraits. If you watch the video you will see me hunched over the camera, using a right angle finder and next to me is the W510 on a chair (I'll get a cool laptop stand someday). In any portrait, but in this shot particularly, it is super important to be able to check facial expressions and detains such as eyes and mouth. With the touch screen I could zoom in and move around the image with a touch of my fingers, another touch and I'm zoomed out again to check the overall look. This is way better than using a mouse of the keyboard.

All in all, postproduction issues aside, I think that this year's covers are my favorite to date. We came up with a unique pose that not only looked good on the cover, but challenged me to work with the players to get the most out of them. They were all great, the schools were all super cooperative, my crew was superb and having the Lenovo W510 laptop to work with was the icing on the cake.

(Peter Read Miller is a staff photographer with Sports Illustrated based in Southern California. You can see his work at his SportsShooter.com member page: http://www.sportsshooter.com/peterrm and at his personal website: http://www.PeterReadMiller.com)

Related Links:

Peter's member page

Peter's personal website

Lenovo ThinkPad W510

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