Bill Frakes: Photo Finish
“The Kentucky Derby is grace and strength. It’s pageantry and determination, it’s beauty and mud and finery and pomp,” says award-winning Sports Illustrated photographer Bill Frakes. “It’s a great cross section of America in one arena. You’ve got people in the infield who have paid very little for their seats and people in the grandstand who have paid a tremendous amount of money for theirs. And everybody’s having an equally good time. There’s something for everyone at the Derby.”
They call the Kentucky Derby the most exciting two minutes in sports. For Frakes the old cliché still rings true, even after shooting the event for more than 20 years. To him, it’s the most exhilarating event of the year. It’s also his most complex assignment. “It’s almost closer to directing,” he says. “It takes an incredible amount of work and we only have one chance to get it right.” Frakes and his crew rig cameras next to and above the track and fire them remotely as the race unfolds. They capture thousands of frames in a matter of minutes and dump them all into an Aperture library on their MacBook Pros. It’s the best way to keep the shots sorted and stored for future reference.
© Don Henderson
“Aperture is quite simply, in my opinion, the most powerful archival tool that a photographer can use,” says Frakes. “I can find my images in several different ways, very easily and very efficiently in Aperture. There are images that would be very difficult to retrieve if I wasn’t using the application, and that’s not acceptable.”
Winner Takes All
Frakes is no stranger to shooting complex action. He pounded the streets for the Miami Herald, capturing daily drama and the disaster of Hurricane Andrew. He has shot sporting events and athletes as a Sports Illustrated photographer since 1992, none more challenging than the Derby.
“It requires a lot of calculation and planning,” he says. “At first it seems like it would be easy, just placing the cameras around the track. It’s not easy at all. The horses can move all kinds of different ways. Calculating the speed, calculating the exposure, calculating the focus positions and calculating the camera positions is just a lot.” Frakes picks several spots at various locations, most around the finish line. He visualizes the coming action and places his digital SLRs accordingly. In 2007 he used almost 40 of them, each one pre-focused. “You know where the horses are eventually going to end up and you focus the cameras there,” he says. “Then everything else becomes planning for them: calculation and guessing.”
It’s a matter of math. Frakes knows approximately how fast a purebred racehorse can run and how long the track is. Plug in the numbers, solve for time and you can figure out when to trigger the shot. In some cases Frakes and his crew link the cameras to his Macs and program the timing in before the race begins. “We know basically, within a pretty tight set of tolerances, how fast a horse will be running at a certain part of the track, so we can tell the Mac to fire these cameras,” he says. In 2007, however, heavy rain forced the photographer to go manual. Frakes carried a camera and his seven assistants triggered the remote cameras by hand, firing off bursts as the horses approached the finish line.
“I don’t have a specific vision for the shoot until Derby day or maybe the day before,” says Frakes. “ I want to make a picture that you haven’t seen before. And, of course, I want the right shot of the winner. But don’t think this is a casual production, I start drafting my plans and organizing gear several months in advance.”
Instant Replay
When the race is over, Frakes’ team retrieves the memory cards and downloads them directly to MacBook Pros and external hard drives. Frakes immediately burns all of the images to DVDs for Sports Illustrated.
The photographer’s cameras capture thousands of images. In 2007, he ended up with 100 selects — images that will ultimately end up on his office Xserve RAID. “We fire the remote cameras before the horses get there and keep shooting after they’ve left,” he says. “Out of 20 shots, two may be in focus.” And then there are the contingency cams. “I’ll put up cameras some places in case something freakish happens,” he says. “There’s a pretty good chance that the camera will yield nothing, but now and again the horses will go that way and you’ll have something genius that nobody else has.”
