I made it through another big one. We had a very successful event and there were no incidents that would inspire long story telling sessions at GFM like last year(sorry). I WAS on TV again this year, but only briefly with no commentary from the CBS announcers (Thank God!). I'm working on about two hours sleep so I may be just a little more incoherent than normal (oh my).
Since nobody was interested in how an event like the Final Four is shot, I'll be brief and summarize the cool stuff I saw. All of the big photo groups had several locations that were all wired into computer networks. Like last time, they all have remote unmanned cameras that are triggered with switches at the manned camera locations. Almost all the cameras and locations were wired into a computer network so they could transmit the photos back to their computers at the digital photo work area. So, a shooter on the court trips either the camera in his hand or any of several other cameras he's working with (in the seating area, under the announcer's table, in the catwalk, on the backboard, taped to the floor right on the baseline, etc) and the image falls out of the camera on a firewire into a gizmo with an IP address that is on the network. All the images from IP addresses attached to cameras associated with a given photographer are fed into a folder or folders on the server so we know who took the picture. The local network they built on-site is connected to the corporate network in say, New York. So as the photos are chosen, cropped, and captioned on-site, they're then available to the company within minutes to be put on websites or sold to clients worldwide. Pretty nifty, if you ask me. Here are a couple links. I'm in at least two of the photos from the final game on SI's site. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/ click on the "NCAA Tittle Game" or "Final Four Action- Semifinals" links http://lpe.ajc.com/gallery/view/sports/2007/finalfour/0402ncaachamp/ Oh, nobody shooting Pentax, of course. I wasn't allowed to shoot... I didn't have the appropriate arm-band :( Cory -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
