I want to start this off by saying I Love Football.
I was hired at The Chronicle on the basis that I had to have a strong understanding of sports photography as I would be live editing the 49ers home games and in charge of culling over 130 plus Niners images an issue for the iPad magazine. For this sports loving girl, it was a dream job description.
San Francisco has had a great run at sports this year. It wasn’t long before I was saying coach Jim Harbaugh’s name
more times a week then mine. Once
I got my bearings with the new iPad platform and how design and photo
integrated, It was time to have some fun. I challenged our team to cover
everything from behind the scenes features at the stadium to multimedia pieces
that encompass what football truly is. If you're interested in checking out the App, you can find it by clicking here.
Team photo at our last home game at Candlestick this season.
I had the privilege to collaboration with our photo team in Atlanta to cover the 49ers NFC Championship game and then ultimately onto New Orleans for the Super Bowl. In Atlanta we had a team of five covering the game and the surroundings. We set up remotes in the catwalks and we all had our beige colored vest, we were ready to go.
In New Orleans we set up triple the number of remote cameras in the catwalks, had five photographers, a card runner and me editing it all. I was sitting in the photo workroom putting together our multimedia piece hours before the game when I got a call from a photo editor friend and he reminded me to enjoy the moment. I hung up the phone, left my spot in the workroom and went to check out the field. He was right. That moment was pretty great. I was at my first super bowl. I took a deep breath, snapped a photo and went back to work.
Flash forward 4 hours. The workroom is filing up and the first sets of pregame photos are coming through. Things are running smoothly and it’s go time. I give final high fives to our photo team and say have fun. The guys head out to the field and our rhythm begins. I know that I can trust them to see what they see, and they know they can trust me to make sense of their voice tags and send through the images that tell the story of the game the best.
That being said, I can’t neglect to mention the power of strong selection back on the photo desk in San Francisco. It was the constant communication between them and me that kept us all on the same page (even through the black out!).
It wasn’t until after the game, when we were on the field
making confetti angels and taking the coolest team photo ever, that that last
six months hit me. It's been an amazing adventure.
The 49ers might have fallen short of the trophy, but our staff really came together to make a super strong paper for the next day. I can’t say enough about how proud I am of the photographers and how hard they worked that week in New Orleans.
Oh yeah, Beyoncé performed at half time too. This is what it looked like from the catwalks. Enjoy!
