What to do when you have 35k worth of equipment at your disposal

[dipstik]

http://www.sportsshooter.com/special...fps/index.html

A USA Today photog rigged up three Canon bodies and three 600mm f/4 lenses side-by-side, then used remote triggers to fire off the cameras at staggered times, so that he could effectively shoot Barry Bond's record home run at 30fps.

I have yet to decide if this is really cool, or....kinda dumb.

[Benny Profane]

I worked for a major sports magazine, close to the photo department. Back about 15 years ago, when the magazine biz was still flush with cash, they would make this guy look like an amatuer. Remote setups in 5 different spots at the Kentucky Derby, with a staff of maybe 10 people there. I went to the Indy 500 with them once - 5 photographers with many remote setups. All that for maybe one cover shot and a few inside.

[Big E]

I had the opportunity a couple of years to hear a talk by Bruce Dale, long-time National Geographic photog. Among other things, he talked about the making of the National Geographic anniversary issue back in 1988, where a bullet was shot through a small leaded-glass earth to make a hologram for the cover. Amazing to hear him talk about how they did it. Some of the raw images he showed (before put into the hologram form) were incredible.

Here's the cover (not a very good representation of the actual cover):



And a (very) few words I found on the setup:

As the design evolved, it became a double laser image of the earth -- one whole and one exploding -- to represent the fragile nature of our planet. Photographer Bruce Dale spent three months holographing more than 200 glass and three lead crystal globes shattered by bullets fired with an electronic trigger as the globe automatically dropped. A computer program calculated the speeds of the drop, the bullet and the impact. A green pulsed laser, at Quantel Lab in Santa Clara, CA, captured the shattering globe with exposures of billionths of a second.

That's right, I forgot, the globe was dropping through the air when it was shot. I guess it would have been too easy otherwise.