@davidbergman

With the first decade of the 21st century coming to a close, all I can say is…

Thank you.

Maybe you’re a client who hired me for a photo or video shoot. Maybe you’re a fan of one of the bands I work with and you bought my photos from TourPhotographer.com. Or maybe you’re just a fan of my work.

Whatever it is that brings you here, I thank you. Your continued support makes this job even more fun than it already is.

Here’s a brief look back at 2010. What a year it was.

The highlight for me was working with Bon Jovi. The entire organization – including the band, management, and crew – is a joy to work with. Over the summer, fstoppers.com made a cool video showing my work behind-the-scenes at one of the band’s stadium shows in New Jersey.

(If you subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed and don’t see the embedded video above, click the title of this post to open it in your browser.)

This year I also continued my work with Sports Illustrated and had the Super Bowl cover. The Saints and Drew Brees were the sports story of the year.

2010 was filled with some other great jobs like making World Series GigaPans, Lilith Fair tour photography, working again with Barenaked Ladies, producing a music video with a DSLR camera, and leading a couple of lighting workshops.

Next year promises to be just as exciting and I hope to have a few surprises up my sleeve.

Thanks again for joining me. See you in 2011.

The fall is my busy season for sports, with much of my work coming from Sports Illustrated magazine. At the front of every issue, they have a section called “Leading Off,” where they pick the best three images from the week and run each one across two full pages.

Having a photo published in the section is, in some ways, tougher than getting a Sports Illustrated cover. You’re competing against every sports image shot that week whether it’s from an SI staffer, a freelancer, or any of the wire services around the world. Jimmy Colton, the man who is tasked with finding images for the section, looks through 100,000 photos each week. He can only publish three.

I’ve been fortunate to have a few of my images in the section this fall.

This photo from the Steelers-Ravens game was just named one of Sports Illustrated’s Pictures of the Year. I shot it with the Nikon 200-400 on a D3 body and the exposure was 1/3200 f/4 at ISO 400.

This Colts interception, right in front of Washington coach Mike Shanahan, put an end to a Redskins comeback. This was the 600mm lens on a D3 and exposure was 1/800 f/4 at ISO 4000.

As soon as they announced that the Notre Dame – Army football game was going to take place at Yankee Stadium, I imagined this photo in my head. I went up in the first half and shot with the 14-24 on a D700. Exposure was 1/160 f/5.6 at ISO 1600.

This image is from the Eagles’ amazing come-from-behind win over the Giants last week. As DeSean Jackson ran the game-winning punt return, I switched from my 600mm to my 24-70 on a D700 to show the entire scene including the scoreboard. Exposure was 1/1250 f/4 at ISO 2000.

I got lucky that Jackson ran right towards me. I guess he wanted to be in “Leading Off” too.

Former Barenaked Ladies singer Steven Page recently released his first solo album post-BNL. Not only is Page One filled with great tunes (my favorite is “She’s Trying to Save Me”), but he used one of my photos on the cover.

I shot the image during a portrait session with Steven last year in Syracuse. You can read how I made the photo and see other images from the session on the original blog post. Yes, you can shoot an album cover image using only small Nikon flashes.

The coolest part is that a couple of people commented at the time that they could see the photo being used on the cover of Steven’s next album.

I shot thousands of photos at 13 Major League Baseball playoff games last month including every World Series game. But in the end, I only had one image from each game.

Huh?

I was not shooting traditional images. I was producing GigaPans.

Since I made one at President Obama’s inauguration, I’ve worked on perfecting my technique for producing Gigapans at large events and have been commissioned by commercial clients like MLB.com and Bon Jovi (I’m the GigaMan?). This year, I had to figure out how to produce one in every postseason city (I needed a GigaPlan?).

It turned into one of the most demanding jobs of my career, but it was also a lot of fun.

The GigaPan hardware and software help you to shoot a series of overlapping photos and stitch them together afterwards to make a super-high resolution panoramic image. The post-processing takes a very long time because the file can be 5 gigabytes or more. Simply cropping off the edges takes 10 minutes to complete. It helps to have a fast computer (with lots of GigaRam?).

At each game, I put a Nikon D700 and 200-400 f/4 lens into the GigaPan Epic Pro and shot hundreds of photos. The biggest one (ALCS game 3: Rangers at Yankees) is made up of 364 photos (26 across by 14 down). The final file is 68,388 X 23,342 pixels or 1,596 megapixels. A normal digital camera file is about 10 megapixels.

When viewing the image, you can zoom in and see incredible detail all around the ballpark. You can see the players in the dugout, find celebrities in the crowd, and as a new feature this year, you can even tag yourself and your friends on Facebook if you were at the game (GigaFan?).

Here’s a 100% crop from the above image:

I logged 25,336 flight miles shooting games from New York to San Francisco and everywhere in between. My normal schedule involved flying into a city in the morning, covering the game that day, doing all the stitching and post-processing overnight, uploading the massive image (on hotel Internet!), sleeping for 2 hours, then going back to the airport to fly to the next city.

I usually slept on the plane, but sometimes would abruptly wake up with the fear (in a GigaPanic?) that I captured the photos incorrectly or hadn’t finished uploading the file.

When the World Series ended, I went back to San Francisco to make two final images of the celebration parade before heading home. After four weeks on the road, this project is finally in the GigaCan.

You can see all of my World Series GigaPans on the MLB website.

Sorry for all the puns. Here are a few more that I couldn’t work into the post. How many more “GigaPuns” can you invent? Bonus points if you come up with a relevant definition.

GigaVan – vehicle used to transport large format photo gear
GigaPants – outerwear worn to stay comfortable while making GigaPans
GigaBand – multi-platinum selling artists like Bon Jovi

Earlier this year, New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez helped me make a portrait of his teammate Tony Richardson for Sports Illustrated.

Richardson is one of the classiest guys in the league. At 38, he’s considered one of the game’s “elder statesmen” and is widely respected by his peers. As a fullback, he’s blocked for some great NFL running backs over the years including Marcus Allen, Adrian Peterson, and LaDainian Tomlinson. He also gives much of his time off the field to local charities.

Since we were outdoors at Jets camp in Cortland, NY, I used my 1000 w/s Dynalites to overpower the sun. The main light was in a large softbox on camera right. I set my camera to tungsten white balance to force the background into a darker shade of blue. A warming gel over the strobe brought Tony back to a normal, slightly warm color.

I added two more bare strobes in the back to create the rim lights around his face and body. I didn’t gel those, so the tungsten white balance turned them a cool shade of blue.

I was doing the shoot as the other Jets players were coming off the practice field. A few guys were giving him some good natured ribbing about his age, but when quarterback Mark Sanchez walked by (Richardson could almost be his father!), he made a comment that this shoot should be for AARP, the magazine for retired people.

That got a big smile out of Tony and I got my photo.

(Nikon D3, 24-70, ISO 100, 1/250, f/14)