Brad Mangin: The Boys of Spring
For freelance sports photographer Brad Mangin, who shoots chiefly for Sports Illustrated and Major League Baseball, spring training is as much a required stop as opening day. Although the story lines from Arizona are typically not as newsworthy as Barry Bonds’ regular season pursuit of the all-time home run record, a chase Mangin has covered over several seasons, they are very much at the heart of baseball’s timeless appeal.
“There are so many changes every year,” says Mangin, who tracked those changes recently during a three-week shoot in Scottsdale, Arizona. “Sammy Sosa is now a Texas Ranger, Alfonso Soriano is with the Cubs, and Barry Zito is a Giant. But also the Diamondbacks have new uniforms, so you’ve got to get the players wearing them. Other than that, it was just games.”
But what games. As described and photographed by Mangin, the pre-season emerges as a kind of baseball lover’s Brigadoon. “It’s a fantasy land,” he says. “When I get up in the morning and open up the black-out curtains in the hotel there is rarely a cloud in the sky. Then I go to a game, every day at one o’clock, each day at a different park. And the days all blend together.”
But Mangin’s photos (see Gallery) stand strikingly apart. To catch these moments, which he does as consistently and sure-handedly as any good short stop, Mangin draws from his deep knowledge of both baseball and photography. And to process and organize the scores of images he generates on every shoot, he anchors his workflow in the field and in the studio on a Mac.
“Spring training involved just classic hard-core use of my MacBook Pro,” says Mangin. “I’d shoot the game, return to the hotel, download my cards into my laptop, select my images, batch caption them, and then burn one or two DVDs, depending on how much I shot.” Mangin generally overnighted the discs to Sports Illustrated in New York, but if the magazine needed faster turns he would ftp JPEGs to his editor so he could work with them until the RAW images arrived on disc.
“When I got my MacBook Pro I couldn’t believe how fast it was,” he says. “Because I frequently have to do everything myself — captioning, archiving, and editing — it’s awesome having this wonderful machine to do it with.”
Up Through the Ranks
The road to Scottsdale and the Majors was as long and circuitous for Mangin as for any of the young players he covers there. “I always loved sports,” he says. “When I was a kid I wanted to be the Giants radio announcer. But as PA announcer for our high school basketball games I discovered that I didn’t have a really good voice.”
What Mangin did have was a really good eye, which he discovered in a formative high school photography course. “I always thought that some day, if I could earn a living going to the ballpark, it would certainly beat the heck out of a real job,” he says. In pursuit of that goal, Mangin studied photojournalism at San Jose State with professors Joe Swan and Jim McNay, pretty much living in the darkroom until he graduated in 1988.
After graduation, Mangin worked his way up through several newspapers, shooting lots of high school and little league sports, until he caught a “big break” working as a San Francisco-based staff photographer for a new paper called the National Sports Daily by director of photography Neil Leifer. “As a 25-year-old punk I went to work for this incredible, 6-day-a-week, 48-page national sports paper,” he says. Mangin covered the NBA finals, the Super Bowl, and the World Series for the paper until it shut down after 18 months.
After that, Mangin “kicked around,” stringing for the Associated Press and eventually taking a job with a small newspaper, but he was unhappy. “I had a taste of just doing sports full time,” he says. “So I quit my newspaper job, and since 1993 I have been a full-time sports photographer — working completely without a net.”
