Buster Posey in iPad edition of Sports Illustrated

Posted on September 3, 2010

This picture was published in the September 6, 2010 iPad edition of Sports Illustrated. Buster Posey of the San Francisco Giants tags out Cincinnati Reds base runner Paul Janish at home plate during the game at AT&T Park on August 25, 2010 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Brad Mangin)

 

I was an early user of the Internet back in 1994. I had my first website promoting my sports photography in 1998. I helped launch SportsShooter.com in 2002. You can’t say I am a complete dinosaur. However, when it comes to having my photographs published there is nothing like opening up Sports Illustrated when it gets delivered to mailbox every week and seeing one of my pictures published as a double truck over two pages. All photographers love seeing their pictures in print real big, and I am no exception.

Here we are now in 2010 and the world is changing. The Internet is not a fad anymore and everyone in the publishing business is trying to make money online. The latest vehicle that print publications are looking towards to save their magazines or newspapers from going out of business is the iPad. Apple’s newest tablet reader has sold millions of units to consumers world wide. Many of the users are reading their favorite print publications on their iPads, and canceling their print copy subscriptions. Photographers like me are going to have to get used to seeing our pictures published electronically instead of the old school way of ink on paper.

Sports Illustrated started publishing an iPad edition of the magazine a few months ago featuring extra content that you can’t get in the print edition. This includes video and photographs. Because of the iPad edition I was able to have a photographed published this week that would have otherwise never seen the light of day (see above).

I shot a Reds at Giants game last Wednesday on assignment for the magazine trying to get good pictures of both pennant contending teams. I feel like I have been in a slump lately and have not made any real good pictures this baseball season. I was due to get something, wasn’t I? This game was played on a gorgeous afternoon, but after the Reds jumped out to a 10-1 lead it looked like all that was left for me were a few hours of bad garbage-time baseball that would not yield any good pictures. That is the great thing about baseball, just when you think it is over, the Giants came back with 10 runs to take an 11-10 lead before they lost 12-11 in 12 innings. What did this mean for me? A long game with great light that just kept getting better, and a nice play at the plate in the top of the 12th inning!

I had a nice sequence of Giants catcher Buster Posey blocking off the plate and withstanding a collision to tag out Reds base runner Paul Janish. I immediately chimped the frames on the back of my camera from the inside first base photo well and was both happy and surprised that the frames were sharp and I had something good. It might even be worth getting published as a Leading Off double truck in Sports Illustrated, I hoped.

Close, but no cigar. Sports Illustrated picture editor and Leading Off Czar Jimmy Colton told me on Monday that the picture did not make it into the print magazine, but it DID make it into the iPad edition. Nice! I finally got a nice picture published. My friend Grover Sanschagrin, always good at giving me a hard time and raining on my parade, told me via instant messenger from Tlaquepaque, Mexico, “Looks like your picture wasn’t good enough to get published in the print edition!” Geez. Thanks Grover!

Grover is correct. The best three pictures that Jimmy sees all week make it into the print version, but because of the iPad version the pictures like mine that ALMOST made it now have a home so readers can enjoy them. I am really grateful for that, and hope that the iPad edition of the magazine is successful so more and more of our pictures can be seen. This might be the vehicle that keeps publications like Sports Illustrated hiring photographers like me so they can get some cool original and exclusive content that can’t be seen anywhere else. I hope so!

Of course, I do not have an iPad yet and have not seen the picture as it was published, but I did get a cool PDF file of it so I can share it with everyone here in my blog. Do YOU have an iPad? If you do check me out in this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated!