Michael Zagaris: Capturing the Game
Postgame Processing
Zagaris doesn’t sift through his photos alone. He has the help of editor and assistant Sara Wolfram. The two cull the photographs on the road using a MacBook Pro, Aperture, and Photo Mechanic. “I usually edit a day or two after the game is over,” says Wolfram. “My time at the computer depends on the quantity of images. It’ll take me about four hours to edit 1000 pictures and then another hour to get them sent off.” Wolfram tags and captions nearly every shot that comes out of Zagaris’s camera using Photo Mechanic. She archives all the shots using Aperture. The best shots are exported directly to PhotoShelter, an online picture vault. “I can export directly to PhotoShelter from Aperture,” she says. “It’s almost instantaneous — exporting to PhotoShelter is just another menu item in Aperture.”
The duo also has access to the extensive Zagaris archive, which is stored on external hard drives in the photographer’s San Francisco Bay Area studio. “Aperture mirrors the home archive, so we have access to it wherever we are,” says Wolfram. The editor can view low-resolution thumbnails from the archive (the entire archive is too large for a single hard drive) and download high-resolution shots when she needs them.
“Aperture saves us so much time,” says Zagaris. “I really don’t have time to pick through my archives to find a shot. I have to make calls, I have to be shooting. With Aperture, I can instantly bring up any shot from the archives or yesterday’s shoot.” And now that his work is available online at PhotoShelter, more people can see his shots. “In the end, you are what you shoot,” he says. “The reality is, unless you have something like Aperture and PhotoShelter, few people see your work. Now a lot of people are getting access to my stuff.”
Fame and Obscurity
Zagaris loves to get his work out there, but he wants permanence. “Having my pictures in a museum means the most to me,” he says.
“A museum is permanence. It means that a number of people think that your work is important and should stand as a mirror frozen in time.” He doesn’t have to worry about getting his work into museums. His photos of rock legends are already being courted by museums like the Getty in Los Angeles.
Zagaris also has aspirations to turn his lens on other places and cultures. “It’s a way of sharing an experience, of giving people who weren’t there the opportunity to be there,” he says. “When you look at images that other people have captured, it puts you there and it alters you — it does a lot of things to you.” His first foray into foreign lands will likely be Cuba. “I would like to spend a month there and document the people,” he says. “There will be a lot of changes in Cuba in the next few years and it’ll never be the same again. I’d really like to be there to document the changes.”
Michael Zagaris, left, with the Oakland Athletics. Photo by Brad Mangin.
In the end, Zagaris isn’t in photography for the fame, or the money. “For me, the payment has always been in the doing and the experience, doing things that people only dream of,” he says. “I want to keep having the experiences and I want to keep capturing them. Life goes by so quickly and I’m lucky that I have a passion for what I’m doing.”
