On Assignment: Minneapolis, MN

I've been sitting at this noisy Starbucks for almost an hour, racing against the clock to upload the 400 images from part of my job in Minnesota to ESPN's server before my battery on my laptop runs out, because I forgot to throw either my extra battery or the charger into my bag before I ran out the door to find a better high speed connection than my horrible DSL at home. Oh, BellSouth, how I loathe you so!

Minnesota is a long way away from Miami. Yep, you heard it here. It's a long way away to the tune of 2 long plane segments beyond the steamy heat of South Florida, and into the crisp, amazing fall weather in Minneapolis. So, to set the stage...

Who? Me, and my college friend and occasional assistant Brian Harkin. What? An assignment from ESPN the Magazine, one of my top 5 clients, in frequency and quality, to photograph the Metrodome. Where? Minneapolis, MN. Why? The Metrodome is a very interesting example of one of a handful of multi-use stadiums around the country which are shared by different pro teams in different sports, sometimes on the same day, only hours a part. My assignment was to photograph the transformation of the dome from baseball field to football stadium to starting point of a marathon (Twins to Minnesota/Michigan to Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon) all within 24 hours. How? Documentary photography of the crew breaking down the stadium from baseball to football, including a mounted camera position in the upper deck rigged with a remote interval timer.

This year I've had a handful of break-out clients who, though I've shot several things for them each of the last 2 years, have really blown up for me and our relationship has matured to include a lot more travel and more interesting assignments. As a freelance photographer, and as a business owner in general, this is one of the most gratifying experiences there is... delivering a service that is not only good, but good enough that the client returns and increases their order and expectations time and time again. This job for ESPN was one of the most complex I've had given to me thus far, was directly after my last shoot for the magazine which has been my favorite and best shoot I've had all year, and the new job looked like it had the potential to be one of the coolest things that I'd seen in quite a while. And while a component of it (the mounted camera) wasn't really in my normal wheelhouse, the assignment posed a challenge that I was excited to attempt. Notice all of the run-on sentences... its basically how my brain works directly after getting a job... ; )

As I chronicled in the last post, a couple dozen seconds after I wrote about how much I like the day after a bunch of work, etc., I got a call from one of my editors at the magazine and was asked to go to Minneapolis pretty much immediately. The immediately part is not a problem almost ever... I've flown off to assignments on a couple of hours notice at least a dozen times this year, and because I travel pretty light and don't use, or even like, a ton of gear, its a pleasure that I have to always be ready and willing to go do an interesting assignment, no matter the distance. That sounds a little far-fetched, but I actually do like having to extend myself out and head off to some place off the beaten path and get something done quickly. It's probably not healthy in a long-term way, but I grew up in newspapers and its always been part of the terrain that I knew. Deadlines are my friend.

However, this assignment's immediacy was matched by 2 potential problems that had to be solved within an hour of accepting the job, or else I was in trouble.

First, I couldn't do this job alone -- wasn't even a choice, because of the secondary mounted camera which had to be watched over, and occasionally tweaked. And #2, I had to get my hands on a remote timer to attach to the remote camera. Equipment issues first: normally buying a piece of gear last minute is not a big problem... you either get it locally, or have it shipped overnight from B&H or Adorama, etc. However, I got the call at around 2:30 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon. Slightly bigger problem because that's after the deadline most mail order photo places have for shipping out equipment for overnight that day... so I couldn't buy from NYC or anywhere in EST. Then I had to factor in the upcoming Jewish holiday which could affect hours and work load at almost every mail order place in the country, which are almost all run by orthodox Jewish owners. Also the timer, a Canon TC-80N3, which I researched quickly and found that I couldn't do without, was not an item that many stores kept in stock, especially locally. I called a dozen places in South Florida... no luck. Then I called places in Minneapolis... no luck. The problem was getting bigger within ten minutes of accepting the job.

Meanwhile I also started to call assistants. My friends Travis, Kenneth, and Andrea... no, no. no. One in college and busy, one moving Eastward, and one having just left for 2 weeks in Bogota. The question of finding a good, solid assistant has been a big issue since moving to Miami, and since Travis started grad school in Ohio (bastard!), because, even though there are TONS of assistants down here to help with the commercial catalog and fashion shoots, there are very few, so far as I've been able to tell, assistants who do editorial and are fun to be around. Therefore I've had to call on friends who live various places around the country to fly out and meet me at the assignment. It can be done, but its not something that magazines really appreciate (having to arrange travel from multiple locations to the job).

So now its 3:15 p.m., I still don't have an assistant or a remote timer, and have now learned that ESPN wants me on the 11 a.m. flight the next morning, which means that even if I could find the timer in a place on the West coast that would ship it overnight to me in Miami, it wouldn't do any good, because I'd already be at the airport and would miss the delivery. Bad. Shit. FUCK.

But then I got a call back from Brian, who was on assignment and couldn't talk, but told me that he was free to do whatever it was that I needed (he still didn't know... that's what great about other photographers; they say yes first!). Then I got a bit of inspiration that I should look for a photo store in the Dallas area, where Brian lives, who may have it. Yes! My first call found the timer in stock, but at a considerable mark-up to the price that B&H carried it at. At this point, that didn't matter at all... I needed it, or had to call back my editor and give him the unfortunate news. The other pieces fell into place: ESPN arranged all of the travel for both of us, I called the Dallas camera shop and gave them the situation and my credit card number, and Brian promised to pick up the timer and a few other goodies at the camera shop before he went to the airport. All of the problems had been solved, and I even found 2 micro ball heads that I had packed away in one of my many old camera bags, so I didn't have to buy a new one to use to mount the camera. The logistics and prep for the assignment were done... so I went out for sushi with my girlfriend, as a apology for having to leave, again, and had a quiet and nice night.

The flights to Minnesota on Friday were uneventful but long -- OK, because I had picked up Zadie Smith's excellent "On Beauty" on my last assignment. Brian joined me on the 2nd leg, as I was routed through DFW on my way. We got in at 5-ish CST and found our rental car (note to the directors of the MSP airport... for God's sake, make it easier to get to the rental car station from the terminal... its really pathetic). We got to the hotel very easily, not always the case, which was perfectly situated just about 6 blocks walk to the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis, and after checking in (another note: what ever happened to the ever-expanding network of hotels offering free wireless??), got a great recommendation for a local, independent restaurant called Nochee, where we had a nice dinner. The big bonus of the entire weekend was the incredible early fall weather in Minneapolis, which is a great city itself. Having lived in Miami for 9 months, I can't tell you how fucking awesome it is to again feel the crispness of a fall day. Very glad that I packed my favorite zip-up.

After learning that the writer missed his flight Friday night, and would be late getting in, I was also told that the video team (on some ESPN the Magazine jobs, things get slightly more complicated because Bristol (headquarters of the TV network) gets involved and also wants to send their people to do video and sound, in addition to the rest of the team. Sometimes photographers and videographers (and their crew) work very well together, and its all good. Other times, its hell and you are constantly getting in each other's way and crossing swords. Normally, its not great news to learn that Bristol is coming) was not going to arrive to the stadium until 1 p.m. on Saturday, well into the Twins game that began at 11 a.m. So we had tons of time to hang out in the morning, get breakfast, read the paper, and relax. We were relaxing, in fact, when I happened to finally see an update on the baseball game going on down the street, and learned that at 12:20 p.m., the game was already in the 6th inning and was flying straight through to completion. Shit! Brian and I jumped up, got our gear, and practically ran to the stadium just as the writer had gotten in town and arrived himself. We needed to capture, at the very least, the last inning of the Twins baseball game (from the remote camera) in order to show the evolution of the stadium from fully from diamond to football field.

With hardly 3 outs remaining in the game, we finally had a position picked in the upper deck directly behind home plate, and got set up and clamped in. The remote timer, which I was worried about and had Brian check again and again all day, worked perfectly. By the last out I was in the team tunnel on the 1st base side and took to the field with the crew members who instantly upon the end of the game began to break the baseball field down and start preparations for pigskin. It was really unreal to watch three guys run at the pitcher's mound and attack it with shovels, breaking away the dirt to expose the edge of the wooden palette that its built on, so the whole mound could be carried off the field and preserved (the mound is too preciously made and perfected to be totally destroyed and remade each time). Literally after 15 seconds, the outfield walls and banners were already coming down. 5 minutes after that another crew was painting the end zone logos of the home town University of Minnesota Golden Gophers. The pace and energy of the crews was absolutely incredible, and I ran from place to place around the field trying to document everything.

Photographically it was a pretty easy shoot on the field. The scale and number of people made for easy compositions and dramatic pairings, and the backgrounds were either very clean or had an epic depth (eg. the rest of the dome). It became very apparent that I was going to shoot way more than normal on the job because after 20 minutes I had already filled up the first of my 4 GB CF cards, which is about 300 images in RAW format on my 1DsM2. By the end of the 2nd day of shooting, I had reached the 2000 mark, which is probably the first time I've ever done that on a assignment that short. 2000 digital files is a totally different problem on the post-shoot end of things, of course. On assignments where there is a chance that I'll shoot a lot, and need to download my digital cards on the fly, I make sure to pack a portable hard drive made by HyperDrive that I call my "dump drive." I've now had 2 different types of these, one with a screen to preview the images, which also played music and shit, and the new one with only a LCD panel that told you the bare essentials of information. The new drive is totally great, and very fast. I'm not the type of photographer that wants to see what I'm shooting while on assignment... I actually prefer not to, unless there is a CD or AD present who needs to direct things, which is pretty rare for me.

After several hours the field had been transformed, with only the dirt around the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd bases left over as reminders of the diamond. Brian and I had time to head outside and try and find something interesting with the tailgaters, of which there wasn't much. We even had time to try and eat some of the terrible press food, which made me glad I didn't continue in my early-college aspirations to become a dedicated sports photographer. But by the beginning of the football game (Minnesota vs. Michigan -- Mich. dominated the game from the very beginning), Brian and I were both exhausted, and happily packed up our gear and finished the remote timer work with the kickoff. Beer and pizza were in order, and I downloaded all of my cards and made sure that the timer camera had done its job. We made it an early night because the last part of the assignment was to photograph the beginning of the marathon that was using the Metrodome as its starting point early the next morning.

The marathon could not have been scheduled on a more beautiful day. In Miami there is often a thick haze and cloud cover at sunrise over the Atlantic, like a lot of other big cities, and you sometimes miss out on the first rays of sunlight. That's not the case, or wasn't on Sunday, in Minneapolis, a city that both Brian and I wondered aloud several times in a our short trip why we didn't just move there. The light was gorgeous as we walked back to the dome, and there were people, happy, excited, and very nice people, everywhere. I had expected that because it was a relatively early start to the race, 8 a.m., that people wouldn't really gather in mass until at least 7:30, but when we got out there 20 minutes earlier than that, there were already people filling the streets.

The light was beautiful, but not in the right places, and most of the Metrodome that was visible from the race was in deep blue shadows, making exposures difficult for the race. I quickly got what I could and moved further and further down the course until I found a spot that the runners would have to come by near the start line, which lined up perfectly with the metrodome and the morning sky. This part of the shoot was again pretty easy... by 8:20 a.m. I was finished and with the free coffee that Brian had scored for me from the race, we headed back to the hotel, had breakfast, and then packed our bags and headed to the airport. The airport had been such a close and easy drive to the hotel, that I didn't even have to refill the rental car to full again (and it was a SUV!) so that was even better. After figuring out that we would be done shooting far earlier than our planned flights back, we had changed our flights the night before, and I had received a much earlier trip back through Chicago. That flight ended up being 4 hours late, and I was rerouted again, pretty much back to my original flight back.

Being stuck in airports is such a huge part of being a freelance photographer who does any traveling. It's really what wears me down. All of the other stuff, no big deal. But the airports kill me. When I would otherwise return home in a good mood after a very successful shoot, often times the trip sucks all of that out, and I end up pretty grumpy when my girlfriend kindly picks me up outside the terminal and drives us home. She is eager for details and stories, and I have almost no energy to even feign interest in sharing much. It gets down to one-word responses... "good, OK, yeah, no." And then once home, she has learned, begrudgingly, to let me get my head settled... let me logon my computer and check my e-mail and do the insubstantial little tasks that make me feel slightly caught up, before I'm back to normal and want to interact with any person on Earth. Weird little emotional experiment, really.

So, to wind this very long post up... the 2000 images included 400 from the remote camera. The easiest way to send 400 images is by burning a DVD and FedEx-ing that up to your client, which I did. However, it was lost temporarily in transit, and I had to, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, transmit them also via FTP. Again, I hate BellSouth. Out of the 1600 other images, I made a total of 89 selects, which I toned, cropped, captioned, and then converted from RAW files to JPEG to also transmit up to NYC via FTP. All in all this shoot's post production took a total of a day and a half, which is a lot more than normal, even when I'm working slowly. I feel pretty good about several of the images from my selects. I wish we had had more time, or had more choices for the upper deck camera position. The best spot would have been somewhere in the roof, really, but the Metrodome doesn't actually have a real roof (no structure for one, just a balloon that is constantly filled with air by huge jets all around the stadium), so that wasn't an option. Now its a waiting game to see what my editor thinks... currently the work is slated for next week.

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