Brad Mangin: The Boys of Spring
Digital Changeup
Although Mangin now shoots exclusively with digital cameras, all of his education and much of his early career focused exclusively on shooting film. In fact, he didn’t shoot his first digital assignment until 2002, when he covered some Giants night games for SI.
“At Sports Illustrated we didn’t go in for digital early because the first digital cameras didn’t produce images of sufficient quality to work well over a two-page spread in a glossy magazine,” he says. “Then in January 2003 the Raiders made a run towards the Super Bowl. I got my first digital cover for the magazine, a picture of Rich Gannon, and they finally switched, literally closing down the famous Time-Life photo processing lab.”
Before the start of the 2003 baseball season, Mangin bought all new digital equipment and never looked back. “We shoot RAW plus JPEG at SI,” he explains. “They edit from the JPEGs and process the RAWs — they want the beautiful files. And the stuff in the magazine looks incredible. They’ve really got it dialed in now.”
Utility Player
Since going freelance and switching to digital photography, Mangin has channeled not only his front-end workflow but his back end business operations through his Mac.
He runs his freelance business through a website powered by liveBooks, updating his content via a web-based interface and uploading his images using PhotoShelter. ”The site has evolved into my archive,” says Mangin. “I own all of my images going back to 1987, and now I have a searchable archive of 9800 captioned images that are priced for sale online.”
Mangin is also experimenting with Aperture when he can find time between shoots. “I really like what I see,” he says. “I especially want to get into some of the high-end book publishing stuff.”
And he anticipates a seamless introduction of Aperture into his workflow. “I especially like that I can take my images, search them quickly then just upload them right to my PhotoShelter account using the PhotoShelter plug-in. It’s exciting that there’s an application that can take my images, which were captioned in PhotoMechanic, read the metadata, and then allow me to edit my shoot and quickly get the images onto my online archive so they are searchable by my customers.”
Besides managing his business online, Mangin also serves as content chief for SportsShooter.com, a free resource for sports photography that he co-founded with friends.
Working the Angles
Although digital photography has changed his equipment and his workflow, Mangin finds baseball, and his approach to shooting it, remarkably and refreshingly unchanged. “Baseball is still the purest, simplest game from when it was first drawn up in the mid-1800s,” he says. “It’s still sixty feet, six inches from the mound to the plate, the bases are still 90 feet away. But to get that special picture is so hard, because there’s a lot of standing around, a lot of isolated action.”
To better his chances, Mangin scouts new players as thoroughly as any opposing manager or coach. “To prepare to shoot a batter I haven’t shot before, I’ll watch the game on TV to see where he looks good from, if he’s a head-up or head-down guy, if he has a two- or one-handed finish, then I’ll search on the wire for pictures others have shot of him,” he says.
But even with total preparation, Mangin says there are simply too many variables in the simple geometries of baseball to catch every shot. “If you’re doing a magazine story about a left-handed hitter with a classic turn, you might set up at first base. But if he walks, strikes out, and pops up, you’ve got no pictures of him.”
Besides stalking the elusive great shot, Mangin is charged with getting different looking shots each season. “Last year my editors got so tired of looking my pictures of Barry Bonds because we had to shoot every at-bat over a one-month period as he approached Babe Ruth’s mark of 714 home runs. I know what I did when Bonds hit 73 in 2001, I know what I did last year, and I can’t replicate that. In this business, you’ve got to come up with a new idea, or it all just looks the same.”
