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sports journalism
The Photographer: 'To come up with a different image no matter what
it takes'
by Brent Cunningham
There
were no childhood dreams of being a photographer, no late nights reading about
the daguerreotype. Manny Millan exited the U.S. Navy in 1966, a twenty-three-year-old
unemployed sailor looking for work. With the help of a friend, he landed a job
as an assistant technician in the Time-Life photo lab. Six months later he was
a photographer's assistant at Life magazine. And over the next six years, while
he lugged and set up lights and other gear, Millan also listened and learned
from some of the best: Alfred Eisenstadt and Henry Goskinksy, Yale Joel and
John Zimmerman. Zimmer man, who also shot for Sports Illustrated and was among
the first to mount cameras in the hockey goal and behind the backboard, had
a strong influence on Millan's career. "To come up with a different image,
no matter what it takes, that was the thing when I was at Life,"
says Millan, fifty-seven. "It stuck with me."
For the last twenty years, Millan has been bringing that
edgy spirit of innovation to sports photography as a staff photographer at Sports
Illustrated. He has mounted a remote-controlled camera on the front of a
kayak, dangled from helicopters, and spent a week in the Colombian jungle photographing
a boxing dynasty. All the while, though, his work remained grounded in the basics
of lighting and composition. He does mostly indoor work for SI, and his
photos inevitably capture the defining moment of the action with studio-like
quality and precision. Consider his preparation for a basketball game at Madison
Square Garden: he arrives at one in the afternoon — five cases of equipment
in tow — for a 7 p.m. tip-off. Depending on what he's after, he may set up eight
or more cameras — on the catwalk, mounted behind the backboard glass, in the
stands, and on the floor. Each is synchronized with his hand-held camera via
a Flash Wizard, a radio-controlled device that allows him to get the same shot
from multiple angles. Next, a set of strobe lights is set up in each corner
of the court, also synchronized like the cameras. Most of SI's indoor
jobs are shot using strobes rather than natural light. They provide an intense,
even light that allows Millan to use fine-grained film and produce higher quality
images. The trade-off is that, while his newspaper counterparts using motor
drives shoot five frames a second, Millan gets one image every three seconds.
"It puts more of a premium on the focus of your assignment," he says.
"We can't just go in and fire away. We have to concentrate on getting the
peak action on one shot."
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