Giants Star Buster Posey in Sports Illustrated

Posted on October 17, 2012

Buster Posey #28 of the San Francisco Giants bats against the Los Angeles Dodgers during the game at AT&T Park in 2012 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Brad Mangin)

 

As we all get ready to watch the Major League Baseball playoffs this afternoon the newest issue of Sports Illustrated is out with a story by Tom Verducci previewing the postseason tournament. My editor at the magazine Nate Gordon told me about this story a few weeks ago when he hired me to shoot a few home Giants games. He wanted me to get a good horizontal picture of Giants star catcher and National League MVP candidate Buster Posey to open up the story. I love assignments like this when I can concentrate on making a nice and clean photograph of an athlete doing what he does best on the field. Since Posey is one of my favorite players to shoot (I wrote about how fun it was to shoot him two years ago) this was a dream assignment. I needed to capture his buttery right handed swing in a unique way so the magazine could drop in type to open Verducci’s story.

I shot one game from outside third base hoping to get Posey really turning on a ball with the pretty September sun back lighting him against the dark background. That worked well when he homered for me in his third at bat so we had that frame in the can. The next game I shot him from the cool inside third base spot, loose with my 70-200 so we could have plenty of sky to drop in type. This is a hard picture to get because I am shooting from behind him, so he really needs to pull a ball down the left field line and turn his body all the way around so I can see him. He turned nicely for me in one at bat in the second game so we now had this picture we needed.

Because my editor likes to cover all his bases (get it? Ha!) he also did a search in my online archive powered by PhotoShelter for Buster Posey to see what kind of stock images I had of him from this season. My editor Nate is listed as a trusted client for my account so he is allowed to search my archive anytime he wants and download my full RAW files.

Nate downloaded several images so he would be ready to show everyone at the magazine a large selection of pictures. They really liked the frame above shot from inside third, but the image they ended up using was a frame I had shot a few months ago of Posey going the other way from inside first base. The image was clean and fit the payout better since the flow of the image was from left-to-right. I was happy with either decision they made and thought the picture looked good. It was the best of both worlds for me. I got to shoot some fun Buster Posey images for my editor, and my cool archive made me a nice space rate. Thanks PhotoShelter!