Busy Weekend: shooting, editing, captioning, & archiving

Posted on August 1, 2011

Manager Ron Gardenhire #35 of the Minnesota Twins wipes his eyes in the dugout during the game against the Oakland Athletics at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum on July 30, 2011 in Oakland, California. (Photo by Brad Mangin)

 

Today is a super rare Monday. It is rare because I can actually say that I am caught up with all of my editing, captioning, and archiving. That’s right. Every baseball game I have shot so far in the 2011 season (66 including spring training) has been processed through my work flow and uploaded to my ever-growing archive. The big reason I am caught up today? I took Sunday off from shooting and worked in my office instead. Because I worked so hard yesterday I am able to share a few of my recent favorite pictures.

I am usually pretty up-to-date with my archiving. I always take care of games I shoot for myself as stock very quickly. Those images are processed through my work flow and searchable in my archive before I go to bed on the day of the game. However, the games I shoot on assignment for Sports Illustrated are not. Those games I sit on for a week or two until the new issue comes out, then I dive in and do the work. Recently I have shot so many games that I was way behind.

On Saturday night I went and shot a 6:05pm start between the Twins and A’s in Oakland. I heard that Joe Mauer was catching for the Twins, and since this is a rare occasion these days I knew I had to go out and shoot him and the pretty light at the start of the game. Between shooting pre-game and the first four innings I felt like I had some real good coverage of the Twins, so after editing my stuff at around 11pm on Saturday night I decided to skip the Sunday afternoon game. There was no way Mauer would be behind the plate (he wasn’t), the light would be bad, and I could take advantage of the time by kicking ass in my office and getting caught up.

Sometimes I get so wrapped up in the day-to-day stuff I forget about some of the fun pictures I shot only a week or two ago. On Sunday morning I was re-living some of the fun games I had recently shot as I started the long process of editing, captioning, and archiving. I was brought back to a fun assignment a few weeks ago when the Angels and A’s played in a real, honest-to-goodness, old school doubleheader. A twin bill at the Coliseum! Just like the old days! My assignment was to shoot the next Mickey Mantle: super 19-year-old phenom for the Angels, center fielder Mike Trout.

I had a blast shooting the young five-tool player for the Halos. Having a chance to shoot him in TWO games on the same day was a great opportunity. He did not have a good day at the plate, but by the end of the day I had lots of good stuff on him, including many fun dugout features (see above). There is no telling what kind of career this kid will have, but if he turns out to be the next big thing I will have many wonderful images from his first week in the big leagues.

I had a fun game in San Francisco against the Mets a few weeks ago that started at 6:05. I have written here in this blog many times about how great the light is for these starts, so besides shooting some general action I did my best to use the light for as long as it lasted. In fact, I even got an early start by shooting some details of bats in the Mets dugout (see above). Who doesn’t love baseball bats? I just have to shoot them every time I see an opportunity.

I then headed out onto the field, and with the permission of Giants head grounds keeper Greg Elliott I was able to shoot some fun, low-angle stuff of him and his crew getting the field ready right before game time (see above). As tedious as editing and captioning can be, it was fun to look back on these images knowing how great they will be in my archive. What a fabulous feeling it is to shoot this stuff knowing that I own the images and they will always be searchable in my archive for editorial licensing to clients all over the world. By the time I was watching “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” on Sunday night I had added 660 NEW captioned images to my archive!

Today is indeed a very good day in the offices of Mangin Photography. Things will get busy again very soon as I have several games to shoot this week, but as of right now there are 49,349 searchable images in my archive, and that makes me feel really good. My friend Grover Sanschagrin has always said he would be impressed when I hit the 50,000 mark. I am getting close Grover!