You done yawning? Are you sure? You're going to wake? We're not keeping you awake. You're retired now, man. You just take naps whenever you want, right? Yeah, just napping your day away. Mentally, when Chris Bryant threw to Rizzo and the camera follows the throw, but then out of the peripheral, you see Chris Bryant fall. And I thought, I did not see the throw get to Rizzo. And I thought when Chris Bryant fell, he went down with the ball. I almost didn't enjoy that moment because I was going, no!
Testing 1, 2, 3 on my mic. Testing 1, 2, 3 on my mic. Testing 1, 2, 3 on my mic. I'm Todd Meisner. I'm Todd Wilber. And I'm Meg McLaughlin. And we're talking pictures, and we just finished a conversation with...
Brian Casella from the Chicago Tribune, who was kind enough to come on and have a conversation with us. And I think you're going to really enjoy this conversation. Brian was the man behind the lens that took the iconic Cubs winning the World Series photo that ran on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. And Brian gets into talking about all sorts of wonderful things about surrounding the technology of covering the World Series and the emotions of covering the World Series or the lack of emotions covering the World Series. So I think you're going to really enjoy the conversation. So Todd, press the play button on this. There you go.
Welcome to the Talking Picture Podcast. On the phone right now, we have the man who has the photo on the cover of the Chicago Tribune from the World Series that everybody is snatching up and putting on their wall. Every bar in Chicago will have this man's photo hanging in a prominent place. Brian Casella, thanks for coming on the show. How are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me. How does it feel to have your picture hanging in every bar or about to hang in every bar? Is that weird?
I mean, you can't complain. There's not too many print newspapers that you think people will hang on to, and who knows how many more major news events will be like this. But there's nothing in Chicago that compares to the Cubs winning the World Series. So to be a part of the team, you get lucky that your quarter ends up in the right place. So yeah, John Kim, our former intern and all-around nice guy, had the sports cover of the Rizzo picture, and then you had the picture from the third baseline of more of the team. But tell us about the overall plan of attack. How were your places positioned? How were you determined who was going to be where?
Sure. For Game 7, we were in Cleveland on the road. We had four Tribune photographers there, which was the most we had of any game of the entire playoffs. Shooting the action, but of course it was Game 7 of the World Series, so it mattered more. So we had two of us at field level, which is the most that anybody had, without that many field positions. Nuccio DiNuzzo was on first base, that was on third base. John Kim was elevated on the third base side, reason being that the team's dugout was on the first base side, so we wanted more angles kind of looking towards where the team would be running out. And of course, Suido was in center field. Kind of the longer distance one, but often a really nice clean angle looking back at the action.
Now, who determined? Did you guys flip? Did you fight for it? I know photographers are competitive. Did you have to arm wrestle, or how did that get determined? New Chair and I did all the games together starting back at the beginning of the NLCS, and we rotated first and third every game. So it kind of all came down to, you know, the roll of the dice the first time. We were like, oh, you do first, I do third, and then we just stuck on the rotation from there. And in each game, you know, it matters differently depending on which stadium you're in, whether you're facing your dugout, you're away from your dugout.
You know, each kind of action picture happens differently, whether you're on first or third, and you get used to that kind of pattern and what things you look for when there's a home run based on where you are. But no, we kind of just stuck to our rotation and, you know, no fighting over it because we had a plan from the beginning that we stuck with. And now who determines who goes and who stays home? Sure, that's the photo editor's job. Not a job I want, but he set kind of a plan in place. We had a few people credentialed and lots of people helping. The two of us kind of stuck with the main beat right through, but then we had lots of people working in addition to that, especially the home games at Wrigley. We would have two, three, four, probably five people sometimes between all the different videos we were producing and fan reactions and views from bars and views from other neighborhoods around Chicago and views from Sheffield and Waveland of just the crowd gathered outside listening to radios who couldn't even see but could feel the excitement. So it was definitely an all-hands-on deck.
effort for the Tribune, kind of like an election day is, but all focused on one big event. Talk about the tethering technology. We don't tether because there really isn't a need for us to tether here, but obviously at the Olympics and something like this, you were going straight into the FTP, I understand. Sure, yeah. The way Major League Baseball playoffs work is that you can't use laptops at field level at all, which is true in some stadiums year-round. And in the Sioux Stadium in Chicago, it's not an issue. There's kind of a little desk space and workspace you can turn around and work in. So most games what we do is we just, you know, during the season, we just take a break, download pictures, you keep an eye on the action if you have to jump up for a big play. But you can miss something, and it's okay because you have to send the pictures yourself. For the playoffs, what they have in place are Ethernet lines. I think pretty much every stadium now is Ethernet lines at the field level positions. And then the better stadiums, the better plan, even have them at the elevated positions.
center field positions. So on any of the pro Canon or Nikon bodies, we're using Canon 1DXs. You plug the Ethernet right into the camera, you set up the FTP information, what folder you want it to go to, and then as you go into the game, you're sending off pictures directly onto an FTP server for whatever you want to transmit back. And if the connection's good, they go in two seconds, and it's a great system. It depends on having an editor in place who can grab those photos, crop, caption, and put them into a live system, because we can't do that kind of stuff without. You know, you can do a little bit of it on your phone, but you've got to spend a lot of time on your phone then and miss the action. So what we do is we use voice tags. So we describe...
Chris Bryant home run fourth inning and transmit that and transmit maybe a couple from the, you know, different sequence photos in the play. Chris Bryant celebrates with Anthony Rizzo after fourth inning home run. But you need manpower to actually be captioning and put it into the live system. But the benefit is we were able to post photos immediately. I mean, every time I would check Twitter, there would be photos from the last inning already on Twitter from the Tribune social media accounts and Instagram already in our live photo galleries. And then as you got later and we're worried about print deadlines, you know, often there would be three or four different editions of the sports section every night with late games and updated events. And if you were waiting until the game was over, you know, it would be long past deadlines by the time you actually sent pictures.
How much of a role did Twitter play in your personal coverage? Because I know you were tweeting from your personal account. Yeah, I stay pretty active on it because it gets, you know, a good reaction from fans. You realize right away that fans respond to good news and not bad news about their sports teams and pictures. So, you know, Addison Russell Grand Slam gets a lot of retweets. Addison Russell makes an error at shortstop does not get a lot of retweets.
So even though for news coverage you shoot both of those things and you run both of those things, on Twitter you might put a little more effort into getting the good news pictures out because they get traction. But the reason I bother to do that all the time is because what we want to do is build traffic. So every time we've got pictures to share, we've got new content coming in. If I can get something on Twitter, I always put a link with it. Here's our galleries. Here's a link to our video landing page. Here's a link to the updated game story that is in progress. So we're constantly giving people a second screen experience. We assume most people watch it on TV anyway. They don't need the picture to explain what just happened, but it's a second look at what you just saw on TV. Here's my angle of it.
Here's maybe a moment of dugout you couldn't see or a moment of stand you couldn't see. Those really do well on Twitter if there's something that wasn't as much of a focus on the TV broadcast. that you happen to catch. And I did that by using my phone just to go into the same FTP server where I was sending the pictures, pulling the back out. So I was uploading to a folder and then downloading back from that folder back to my phone where you can tweet just a second in between innings. Total geek question. What's the FTP app you use on your phone? FTP Utility, maybe, or something like that. And if you just search in the App Store, you'll probably get a million variations of the same thing. I think I use FTP... You type in whatever shortcuts you already use, Refess or anything else, and easy access. It's just like using your desktop. I think I use FTP Pro, but I don't...
You know, the fact that I'm not looking at it because I'm using the phone to talk to Brian. So I'm not necessarily going to disconnect him by accidentally going. FTP to go. No, FTP pro. You're retired, man. You know, what are you going to FTP to? Exactly. Unless I need you to go do something. Brian, I had a question. Are you a fan? Are you a Cubs fan?
Not especially, which is probably a real thing to be able to cover high-stakes games where I'm sure the fans were going nuts at home and not able to concentrate. I grew up on the East Coast. I grew up a Baltimore Orioles fan. I've been in Chicago seven or eight years, going on eight. So I've covered the team, and it's fun to cover a winner, but it wasn't going to emotionally drain me if they were losing a game, which makes it a whole lot easier to cover sports. If you're really invested, it's very distracting. And I think that also, because I've read the Cubs history but not lived it, I wasn't convinced they were going to lose. I think lots of long-time reporters and stuff, when they're down 3-1, this is over. They're down 2-1 against L.A., this is over.
Just looking at it on paper, I thought, no, this seems pretty good. I bet they come back and win it. So I was open to covering it either way. But I had a good feeling from the beginning that they could do something special. Speaking of the other photographers that were in your third base or first base positions, how many were there and who determines who sits where? It depends on the round. So in the beginning, it's the team. So we had the Cubs and the Giants, each kind of the team photographer set the positions. But in the first round, it's not too crowded. And then by the last couple rounds, definitely by the World Series, Major League Baseball set them all. They've actually got a traveling crew of photographers and their chief photo editor.
Jessica Foster in college when I knew her. That's Jessica Carroll. But they coordinate all of that. They work with who's been covering the team all year, which in Chicago is pretty much just the Tribune. It's just three wires and the Tribune shoot all the Cubs games. So that definitely gets you some priority. But they work with who has the most exposure, who has the most clients. So AP, Getty, USA Today Sports. There's a lot of Japanese wires that are here, particularly on games where there's a lot of Japanese players.
You know, for the big playoff games, there's lots. There is some international media, particularly from Asia. Korean Warriors, too. So you've got a mixture of the local papers, which are, you know, not very numerous. The Daily Herald in Chicago, outside of Chicago, and Wellington Heights also covered the playoff games. So there we got spots, too. But they just work in priority, and they work, for instance, in Cleveland, they built field boxes to house a whole lot more photographers. So there were the usual six or seven spots. They might have been able to fit on third base. They probably added 20 more, like working down the third base line, kind of in front of the first row of fans. What normally would be the warning track, there's just an extra two feet added, a little wall added.
And that's a lot of things I've done that. I know Boston's done it. I've known the White Sox have done it before. But Wrigley can't do it. It's just the way the field is currently configured. It's all going to be redone again in the offseason. So at Wrigley, there were only, I think, five good positions on third base and two or three that were pretty obstructed. And I was in those actually for the two of the World Series games at Wrigley. We were in the second row on third base. And you're spending the entire game trying to dodge between turning TV cameras and the guys that are in the front row in front of you because you're about two inches above them. So there's batteries where you can only see the top half of the batter and then all of a sudden the TV camera turns and you try to turn around it.
You've got fans sitting right behind you who paid $10,000 to sit there and they don't want you to get any hired. And they can, you know, hell, you know, you cover a PGA event and they'll tell you they paid $25. I can't imagine $10,000. I paid to see this golf tournament. Get out of my way. It's like, well, there's only one place for me to be.
And it's funny, I think the way the boxes are arranged regularly, which again is going to change in the offseason, but the fans are sitting directly behind you, just a couple of inches higher, and they probably, if they're the season ticket holders, they know what the position's like. If they're not, if they bought them on StubHub, they probably were expecting a front row seat because it's the front row of fans and not realizing that there's equipment and cameras and all kinds of stuff at the edge of the dugout there. So if you want to work with them, you completely understand that this is a chance of a lifetime, but you do nothing to get in their way on purpose. But also, if you can't see, you're pretty useless there. So you're all kind of working together to find a sight line and make it work. But it was definitely far better being in Cleveland for that.
purpose than being at Wrigley. Other things are much better at Wrigley, but for the photo positions, it's really tough at Wrigley Field. What lens were you using? For the final shot. Yeah, Canon 200-400, that's the main lens for pretty much everything I do in sports now. Yeah, it seems that that lens has just taken over, I mean, since it's inception. You know, I mean, I did shoot back when it was 400 or 300 and having to choose, and I think I got the 200-400 maybe three or four years ago, and it changes everything because you've got not only 200-400, but the built-in converters, you go to 560. So I would do that a lot for getting the picture and getting something in the outfield and getting a fan feature and stuff like that. You could even just go in on the batter for a while and shoot tighter and get a different kind of look on the pictures. I think the final sequence, I would zoom down to 300.
So you could have shot it with a straight .300, precisely. But it constantly gives you the option, your left hand's always on the zoom, to go in closer, pull further out, and get a different kind of look. Were you conscious of having air above them so that they could run it vertically? Definitely. Yeah, and that the guys can jump. I was on third base. A lot of the thinking for weeks was about, what do you shoot in the game at? Because you only get a few seconds. And from third base, you're looking across the infield at Anthony Rizzo, hoping the game ends in a grounder so that the ball goes to Rizzo. And it does. And in other situations, I've seen him jump up in the air at that moment.
So I was kind of ready for that. He wanted to leave the space for him to leap off the ground and get a nice clean picture. He didn't, and I think he didn't because he was pocketing the baseball. If you see that, if you watch the replay, he takes it out, he shoves it in his back pocket, and it takes him a few seconds to get moving. I think that was the change in his reaction. I also think he wanted to make sure he was called out by not just standing. It seems like he's like, call him out, and then I can move. Make sure this is really over. Yes. Well, you know, it's interesting that you talked about the switch back to the fan thing again. Now, I was born and raised in the mean streets of Wilmette, north of you, mean bean.
totally sarcastic, that as a Cub fan from birth, Todd across from me is a Cub fan from birth. He's from here. Meg, how would you describe your Cub fandom? I'm a Cubs fan, kind of a bandwagon fan, to be quite honest, though. She thinks they're all, you know, like Chris Bryant is very handsome. He's very pretty. Yeah, very pretty. But I was thinking about, you know, I was editing The Wire from my kitchen table and pacing and drinking my lucky beer. So I can't, and I would, you know.
covered my fair share of sporting events, but obviously nothing as monumental as this. And just editing the photos that were coming through the wire, I needed something I could use that had air above it. I needed something I could use that had celebration because we came dangerously close here to not making our print deadline. I mean, we came very dangerously close. And so when we used the picture of Rizzo scoring what would have been the seventh run and reacting at home plate, I'm like, okay, that's the one, boom, get it done, process it. But I was, as a fan, I was...
Oh, my God. I was stressed. I had no idea how deep. my fandom ran until we got to this, to that point. I was, it was, I don't know. I almost had a heart attack. What about you, Todd? Yeah, I think I kind of want to go back and watch. I still want to go back and watch the whole game on TV because there's so much else going on while you're shooting it that you're not, you're not appreciating the gravity of the sports drama. I mean, I said to some of the guys after it ended, like, I think we just saw like one of the best baseball games ever, but we're doing so many other things during the game with worrying about whether the line is down and texting the office and communicating about deadlines and pulling photos for Twitter.
trying to keep track of where all your equipment is and what your plans are and whether the remotes are turned on. You're just focused on shooting a game. It is the seventh game of the World Series, but it's also just a game that happens in front of you as it happens. It's different than it feels on TV, I think. I think the next one I'd be fine because I'd already got one in the back pocket. But I'll tell you, that first one after 51 years of life on this planet and having grandmother and mother and whatever have passed away before, it just was... My palms still get kind of sweaty thinking about it because it is that monumental. And I went to the parade.
Me and 5 million other people. I always promised myself that I'm not spending $10,000 unless somebody's paying me to be there. I'm not spending $10,000 to attend a baseball game. In your retirement, Todd, you've got that kind of money, right? I think if I was a fan, just going out to Waveland and Sheffield would actually be a great experience. Those are where the real fans are. You're the ones that can't afford to get in, but will show up anyway. People at every front yard with projector screens and radios turned on and just being part of the experience. I saw some great photos, and I cannot pronounce his last name. It's Rob.
Tringali? Yeah, that's how you pronounce it? Okay, Tringali. I think it's Tringali. Because that sounds like something you eat in Italian. Tringali sounds like something you eat. I'd like to have two Tringali to go. But he had some great outside stuff that I looked at today. Yeah, a few people did. I mean, Scott Strasante was out there for a few days. Lots of strip stuff. We had people. Aaron Hooli was up in the Cubby Bear a lot. Lots of different angles and stuff. But yeah, there was all kinds of pictures out there. There is every game, actually. But especially for the World Series.
Hey, so have you covered other World Series before? I thought I read in the blog post you had that this wasn't your first time. Correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah, I actually covered, you know, work for newspapers, so you cover whatever the local team does. And when I was in Tampa, the Rays went in 2008. It's actually Joe Maddon's Rays. Yeah, it's the man. So I got to do that one. Yeah, they lost in five games in Philadelphia. So the World Series wasn't as exciting, but the ALCS that year was a seventh game back and forth with the Red Sox at Fenway and a 2-1, you know, tight game to win the pennants and all kinds of drama there. So, yeah, it was a few years ago, but, yeah, I got to see the experience before. Oops.
Brian, I was going to ask, is third base your kind of preference for shooting baseball? Oh, it all depends. It depends on a lot of things. In Chicago, both teams, both home teams use third base as their home dugout, which is actually unusual. And that makes a difference because you get a little bit of angle into the dugout for players, you know, interacting, high-fives after home runs, you know, to cross pitchers after keeping up grand slams kind of thing. And you also get the guys turning back towards you to react. You know, if they score a big run, they're going to look at their teammates in the dugout. So in Chicago, third base is especially good. In general, with baseball, a lot of things work out well from first base. You get the guy sliding into home plate for the play at the plate usually works out better from first because you've got him coming at you more.
A little more time for the pitcher, you know, reaction as the guy circles behind him on third base. You've got guys running down the line at you after they, you know, have a big play. Often as they reach first base, you get the batter's reaction as he's kind of coming around first. So, you know, both are beneficial. You never know which one was going to be better until the game's over. And then you can say, of course, third base was better. But, you know, when the game starts, you don't know that. You said in your blog post that, you know, the answer to the age-old question that we all get is that this is the best game you've ever covered, or at least it ranks very highly. But where does this photo rank?
For you? Well, it's different ways to look at it. And the historical significance, you know, I'll never take another peak moment of the Cubs winning the World Series, so it'll be that. But if I was to just critique the aesthetic merits of the picture versus other sports pictures, it's just okay. I think, you know, it's a couple good faces and guys in the air, a couple, you know, one guy who's turned away in the wrong direction. So, you know, that's where you look at, you know, I suppose I was going to enter a photo contest this year, and would I even throw it in? I mean, maybe if I was already entering, but it's not going to place anywhere, you know, by itself. It's just an ordinary sports picture. You can get a reaction picture like that from a high school game any day. Interesting.
But it's all about the historic significance of what the moment actually represents, not the picture itself, I think. Aesthetically, did you shoot a photo that you like better? No, I think we got it right from what we had in the sequence. That was kind of the best peak of the way the guys came together. In other games, there would be better moments. Like in the ALCS, there was a moment where all four guys were off the ground together reacting. Again, because there was a delay that didn't happen the same way this time. I said afterwards I was happy with the picture, but I was also kind of, maybe nervous, but also curious to see what was on the wire because I had a feeling that there were lots of good pictures out there. When the game ends, all nine guys on the field plus all 20 guys on the bench react at the same time. There's going to be pictures in lots of different places.
The first chance to look at the wire, you know, five hours later was a chance to see what did everybody else look at and what did they get. And there were lots of good pictures out there, but, you know, there were a few of us that also looked where I was looking, and I think that was probably the peak moment because it was the most... Guys in the air with the best faces spinning at the right time. Having edited a lot of it, yeah, you're right. I thought your picture stood out from that moment. But I want to know how Chris Coghlan got out of the damn dugout so fast to end up in your photo. He didn't move that fast all season, and he's the first guy from the bench. I mean, it looks like he was playing short on a bunt or something. He got there so fast. I should go back and find a replay of just the dugout reaction. I guess there are dugout steps that were open, and there's a lot of guys that are behind the fence. Maybe he was the guy who was the closest to the steps when the game ended, and he took off first. My favorite. Go ahead. When I looked at the sequence afterwards.
There's a second kind of nice moment of Coughlin, the guy who jumps up in the air, the highest, big face, while Rizzo's coming down with a big smile, and Brian's still there with a big smile. And I kind of like that one, and that was probably maybe my second choice. But it's Chris Coughlin at the top of the pile, not Anthony Rizzo. That's exactly right. What matters. As a fan watching and as a photographer, one of the things that I remembered, there's a...
Great shot of, I think it's Carl Edwards with a W flag. And he's got it over his shoulders. And he's walking it towards, it looks like the third baseline. But there's a photographer behind him. And like three steps behind him with what looks like a wide. And all I can think of is, get out of the shot. You've got nothing from behind. Like, what are you doing? Get out of the shot.
You've been that guy behind him before, though. Well, and you know, and I think there's like that horrible light coming through the W flag. I don't know. I can imagine it working. I just can remember everybody on the. The only thing I can think of is all the photographers on the other side just being like, get out of the back. Yeah. He lubrimmed him. Yeah. Sorry. That's a local inside joke. That's a local inside joke. I apologize. But anyway, like the best moments of reaction are really the first 10 seconds because.
After that, you know, first you get all the guys in a big group huddle just bouncing up and down yelling at each other, but you see mostly their backs, even if you're up high, you see a few faces sticking out. And then you get, you know, everybody running out of the field, and you've got guys putting t-shirts on and separate hugs going on while there's media and cameras around. Once the t-shirts go on, it all kind of, I thought the Ross picture above when he was raised was a really nice moment. I think the back of the Carl Edwards picture is that he reminds me of a little kid playing superhero. Yeah.
With his cape. And that's why that picture has such a wonderful, pure feeling to it. I was dying inside because he got those first two out so easily, and then he realized he was in the seventh game of the World Series, and he started holding onto the ball a little too long, and it kept going into the dirt. And I'm like, oh, this kid's going to be scarred for life. Get him the hell out of there! I mean, I was thinking he would have been a pretty good reaction on the mound. You know, again, from third base, one of the big decisions to make was what to look for, because when the World Series ends, the picture is often the pitcher and the catcher jumping into each other's arms. Going back to, what, like, 1956, with Don Larson and Jogi Berra.
those kind of famous moments. So you kind of think you have to do that, and then you have the dugout running from right behind them coming at them. So you've got the pitcher and the catcher go up, and you see six guys behind them with big smiles running towards them. That's usually the World Series picture. And when Mike Montgomery came in and only threw two pitches, he's a midseason acquisition, not a big part of this game. He's the guy who gets his name on there as a save. But, you know, I didn't want to have to shoot a Mike Montgomery picture. It seemed like he was the one who should represent the World Series on the Chicago Tribune forever. But, you know, if the whole team ran towards him, then that was where it was going to be. And so while going to Rizzo, I was trying to keep track of where – I'm not sure I could specifically track Montgomery at the same time, but I could get a sense of where the group was moving.
And I could sense it wasn't moving towards Montgomery. And then as you actually saw in the sequence, he actually goes over to Rizzo. So I think he said something like he apologized to the catcher, Montero, later for not doing the expected pitcher-catcher hug, which is what normally happens. Nobody knew what to actually do. But yeah, we ended up with more of the core of the team as the infielders. Those are the four guys who have been there all year and are the faces of the team. Not so much Montgomery and Montero in this case. And especially not Chris Coughlin.
It's the bromance. It's Rizzo and Bryant. I mean, that's what makes that photo because those are the two iconic players from this team, the two best guys. I thought it was interesting how Russell is all but falling over. He and Baez had just gone up in the air together and had just come down. So they're coming down from their jump at the same time. Rizzo and Bryant are going up. And that was something we had noticed in other games. So after the NLCS, actually after game six when they won the NLCS, they finally won the pennant, you know, beat the go curse and everything.
Same kind of situation. What do you watch for? And I think a few of us locals had kind of started to watch that. Well, maybe some of the wider photographers were more watching the Pitcher Catcher just because of what we know the team and we know what we think we want to get the picture. And they might be going more for what the full national view of what the team winning is. And so from third base, actually, in that case, I was on first base. I knew she was on third base. The four guys go together. They leap up in the air. He makes a beautiful picture. That's our front page of the four guys all together. From the other side, I'm shooting the exact same sequence. The four guys running at each other and leaping. And I think I might have something, but I know there's a lot going on. There's a security guard to my left who's just run out. There's umpires moving around.
And when I actually get to look at the sequence, the Dodgers first base coach crosses directly in front of me and completely obliterates the entire sequence. You see like an arm and a leg sitting out as these guys leap. And that's just part of how this stuff works. You've got all these moving parts happening at the exact same time. And there's only one peak moment as the guys reach each other. So you just hope that your tunnel is clear on that moment. And sometimes it's not. And for the World Series it was. But as I kind of laid out on the blog in the sequence, I mean, one second before Rizzo reaches Bryant is an umpire in front of me. So that sequence happens slightly differently.
There's no way to plan in advance for how to avoid that. You know, you can change your position a million times. You don't know where the umpire is going to be standing at that precise second. I feel like there should be a rule that they need to hold their position for like that for the first 10 seconds of the celebration. Nobody needs to like umpires just stay because of the guy that the umpire on the first baseline doesn't move.
In your picture. He's still standing there, whereas the other guy had a plane to catch. Was it Joe West? I guess if he's standing directly in front of you, you want him to keep moving the whole time. Well, that's true. He's standing in front of somebody on the other side. That's right. Go stand in front of Getty. Go down and stand in front of Getty. I got this. Well, yeah, you answered the next question. Not having the Sun-Times. I mean, you had the Sun-Times because they were pulling from Getty and other wire services, but there's not that one-on-one competition that there once was.
And that, and that there's something kind of depressing about that for me, other than what the sometimes has done. That's obviously that's depressing in and of itself. And I'm on record and having blogged about it and blah, blah, blah. But the, but that, that idea of you sitting right next to. Rob Harder, somebody else that, you know, worked for this. Tom Cruise, usually. Yeah, Tom Cruise. You got that competition of being, I think I got it, I think maybe he got black kind of thing. And that, you know, the fuel to fire, it just doesn't, you know, did you lack that or was there too much to do or did you not even think about it? It's been years now, so we're kind of used to it. You know, they're not there. I mean, in some ways it's even harder because now you're competing against all of the wire services that they have that are there. So, you know, there's four of us there and they had, in effect, 20 people there.
But, you know, it's just a different dynamic. I mean, you know, we're not just there to shoot the same peak moments that AP and Getty are. That's what I think is a huge challenge for newspapers. We have to constantly figure out we both need to get those peak moments for the sports cover, but we need to generate all kinds of other ideas and content and ways to move pictures and move video that will appeal to readers that shows why we're there. You know, what can we bring back of the Chicago experience of the World Series in every different way that makes sense for us to cover the games? Because otherwise you could just look at it from a numbers standpoint and say, no, we'll just run Getty pictures. It's fine.
So it's constantly coming up with pregame and postgame and side interactions and things that are a little bit different because when the actual action on the field takes place, it isn't that different than what everybody else has seen. Well, I think you're right, especially because having edited AP wire photos, the one thing that I noticed was that I didn't get the selection of fan. angst that I was looking for because my backup plan was angst. It hangs in the balance and you needed an angst photo and I never really saw an angst photo that I wanted to run six columns by 18 inches deep. I thought they were almost afterthought because they were focused on the field so much and I apologize because I'm sure that there were pictures that moved that people would disagree with me so I don't want to offend anybody but the idea that Chicago didn't, none of the AP guys like Rex made it, it was Cleveland, the Cleveland AP had the AP positions there or how did that work?
Yeah, it wasn't any of the Chicago guys. It was the local guys plus the national guys that travel for the playoffs. David J. Phillip was there. Same for Getty. They had Elsa there and some other people. Yeah, they kind of put together their playoff team in advance, I think, and then they add in whatever cities they end up being as a team.
send Rex out to the outfield where he likes to be in this big long line. He loves being out there. He's never going to leave that spot. No, and I've never seen anybody take more selfies of themselves in the outfield that were sober. I mean, you only see selfies from the bleachers and people are drunk. But Rex has got his selfie from the outfield and he's dead sober. Or at least we assume he's dead sober. I'm sure he's dead sober. He's having that much fun. Yes, he's having that much fun and his will cap out there in the outfield. Yeah, we didn't miss Rex here. John, he didn't come the last two years, did he? He came here before. No, I know he wasn't here last year. No, he wasn't. He wasn't? No. You know, I had a question. Did you end up then back in the locker room for the celebration?
I didn't. Part of our rotation was whoever was closest to the dugout would do the locker room. So that was Nuccio on the first base side. This time I did it in San Francisco for the NLDS. What kind of prep do you have to do to go in there? I mean, is it like a think tank cover or are you using plastic bags or are you just going, screw it, this is Tribune gear? Yeah, in San Francisco I went and found a vendor who had the right size plastic bag and borrowed it and taped it around the camera. It all depends on what the guys do. Sometimes you get soaked in them, you don't really get that much at all. In San Francisco they waited so long before they let media in, it was definitely post-peak and there were just a few guys kind of toughen beers on each other by that. You know, the TV, you know, the pool feed and the...
team photographer often get really the best stuff. Depending on the team. Some teams left photographers sooner. And you see more. I think most of the guys who went to Cleveland didn't think they got a whole lot because it was, the guys were kind of bunched together in a small corner and, you know, there wasn't a lot of interaction and chance to get inside the huddle and see what was happening. So is the book done? Oh, sorry. Oh, no, you finished your thought. I interrupted your thought. I'm sorry.
You were saying about the locker room. With the champagne, yeah, it's cleaning the lens. I mean, you have to have a towel in your hand because if you do get sprayed, it becomes completely obliterated at the front of the lens. You're constantly wiping it off and making sure you can see something again. I've never made a great picture in the locker room. Dutero actually has. He's made a couple really nice ones. Last year, I remember one in particular, Jake Arrieta just going nuts, and the camera lights are hitting the champagne that's hitting him and everything.
Depends on the locker room size. The Cubs old one last year we're being in was basically a shoebox. I mean, it was like, you know, it's smaller than most high school locker rooms and it was nowhere to, you couldn't move at all, you couldn't see anything. Last year they've got their big fancy room. Oh my God, that new locker room is, I mean, it's talk about, I mean, the comparison is unbelievable. I mean, it, yeah. Enormous, neon lights, everything is brand new. So the guys love it, I think. So the book, the merchandise, is the book done?
The book was done, I think, by the parade or so. It would usually be about 72 hours. Yeah, you hit when the market's hot. So I think they make a priority to have the book all lined up. They add in the last World Series book shows and they get it to the press and have it out in softcover two or three days later. We did it with Blackhawk last year, too. So, yeah, I mean, the stuff sold like nothing I've ever seen sell before, which is not a surprise when it comes to the World Series. But Tribb ended up printing more than a million newspapers, which I think is about three or four times more than normal. There were people lined up in front of the Tribune Tower. They opened up a pop-up shop for two days to three days.
And just sold newspapers and press plates and eventually the book and posters. And the online site, I think, basically didn't work for two days because it was getting so many people trying to buy newspapers for $10. Yeah, I tried to buy the book, and I'm like, oh, just wait. It's not like they're going to not – they're not going anywhere. Yeah, but we tried to reassure people, we're going to print the newspaper as long as we buy it. And they did that. By the three or four days later, I was seeing, like, backslide and Walgreens and stuff where, you know, they finally had made enough of them. They had met the market demand. It was interesting at the parade. I was sitting outside the Roosevelt L Station.
with the guy I went with. And after the parade was over, but they were still in Grant Park, it was interesting how many police officers walked by with pristine newspapers. I was like, hmm. Like, the cops seem to get all these nice-foreseen newspapers. I thought, well, somebody did their job today and got some newspapers. I thought that was good. Yeah, maybe somebody went to the tower and picked up a staff and brought them back to you. Yeah, I thought it was interesting. See, you've got to grease the wheels, man. I thought that was well done. The Chicago Way. The Chicago Way, exactly. Well, what is it? What story? What's the funniest story from the World Series? What's the untold funniest story?
I don't know. I can tell you about the cool tech of how the pictures actually get back. In the case of the World Series, we had a 10-second hold at the end of the game. And what I did with the FTP system was actually turn the camera on, not from sending only specific frames, but to sending every frame I shot. So I did that in the bottom of the 10th. I told my editor, I'm going to switch to the system. And we actually ended up switching editors at the last minute, but Todd Panagopoulos in the office. Panagopoulos was grabbing the pictures.
You know, I shot for, you know, 10, maybe 12, 15 seconds of the guy's actually coming out and celebrating, dropped the camera in my position, left it there, transmitting, still plugged in, and ran out on the field with a wide angle to get the second part of the celebration. So I had no idea what I had. You know, I had a good feeling those guys had come towards each other, spun in the air. I thought I saw faces. I couldn't even have told you for sure it was really with Bryant, although I thought it might be. I thought those guys were going towards each other. And it was probably 10 or 15 minutes later when I got back to the camera, spun through the dial, looked back through, trying to figure out what I had, saw that sequence open up, and called him and said, I think I've got 46, 42, you know, reading the file numbers, wherever they were. Do you have that one? And he said, yep, got it. It's on page.
Because it was actually that quick on deadline. As you know, if you were to, you wanted something immediately. And they were going nuts at the office saying, we've got to go, we've got to go. We've told the press we're not saying anything for the... I think there was no early edition front page. It might have been a sports section that went out with different pictures, but the main front, they held everything until the end, I think. Which was very unusual, and they were very late in delivery the next day. But who wanted a World Series paper without the game in it? Oh, yeah, you could know. No, yeah, no. It was fingernaily bitey here at this end. It got ran out on a rail. Yeah.
Well, I mean, we still got – I mean, speaking of late deadlines, I mean, with the Trump thing, we had people call and didn't understand it. You know, we can't hold the front page until 2 a.m. that he's officially president and have your – I mean, I appreciate that you wanted to hang in your family room a big dispatch artist that says Trump wins, but we can't hold the paper until 2 a.m. there, Jack. We'll do it the next day. Yeah, it was very weird. Just out of curiosity, when the rain delay happened, were you guys dying inside a little bit? Were you hoping –
How does that affect you? Not that much from my end. Yeah, I mean, from my end, you know, often they'll send us what the deadlines are. The deadlines are 10.30 and 11.30 and replay the 12.30 or whatever. It doesn't mean anything to me because all I'm going to do is shoot the action and send it as soon as it happens. And, you know, it's on them in the office. They're the ones who have to decide do we send out an audition without the game or not. So when the rain delay happened, I actually ran into the photo workroom thinking, this is a long break. I'm going to get soaked. I'll get the equipment out here. And basically by the time I got in there and wiped it off, we saw the tart come off and I ran back out again. But, yeah, I mean, I said to my editor then, who was in town, Steve Rosenberg, that this is going to be quick. You know, somebody's going to score right away. Turned out
But yeah, the deadline thing is like, I'm just going to send them as soon as it happens and you guys have to figure out what goes into print and what goes online and what goes where and all the content ends up somewhere. But it's on the printing press side to figure out what they can print. Well, the Tribune team did a great job, all four of you, and all of the people back in the office, because I know that even at, you know, the simplest of things, to the simplest of coverage to the most complicated of coverage, there are so many people involved in the way those things from your page designer to your, because our page designer was sitting here, you know, tapping his fingers at our end. I can't even imagine at your end. So you guys did a great job. Is there, what's the next big thing for you?
I have no idea, but you never really know. That's how it works, right? You just wait and see what happens. So, yeah, we'll just cover it when it comes to it. We've got, you know, back in the basketball and hockey season and the opening day before we know it. But we do all kinds of, you know, I don't just do sports. We do everything else, too. So we'll just see what happens in Chicago. Well, you do the after the shooting photos. That's a really great idea. You want to talk about that a little bit and get off sports a little bit?
Sure. Yeah, I do. The last two years I've been doing a project called The Next Day that I started that's about Chicago neighborhoods living around gun violence. And what I do is I just go back to the same block where there was a homicide the day before, where we've probably already done at least some coverage, if not much coverage. We've kind of mentioned the victim's name. We might have interviewed family. I go back and look for something different, look for something about who normally lives here, who runs a business here, who has a small family connections here, who are the kids that play here, what does it mean for them to be having this happen on their block. And the idea is just to make sure that we see, you know, we have these absolutely awful.
gun violence numbers in Chicago, and they're even higher this year than they have been in 20 years. But it's not, these aren't war zones. So I think if you only see those numbers and you only see the photos of the crime scene tape and people crying, it's probably easy to imagine that certain neighborhoods in Chicago are only like this all the time. It's only a homicide scene 365 days a year. And even in neighborhoods that have very high violence numbers, they have thousands and thousands of other people that live there every day and go to work and raise their kids. And so it's just a small attempt to make sure we connect their stories.
with our readers who are both in Chicago who don't live in the same neighborhoods where there's gun violence or live in suburbs or haven't been in Chicago in 30 years and have no idea what's going on anymore. And it generally gets a good reaction right away from people in the neighborhood. Not always, but sometimes, you know, if you meet somebody and you kind of explain, I want to share with our readers a little bit more about your neighborhood, they'll say, great, you know, it's not all bad. Sometimes you meet people and say, it is that bad, I'm leaving, I'm moving. But either way, you kind of share someone's story that's not directly about bullets were just fired right here and here's how I'm feeling a day later. And it's just, you know, adding just a little bit more perspective on what it means to the neighborhood.
Cool. Yeah, that's that's awesome. I thought that was a great idea when I first saw that pop up. And yeah, no, it's I mean, we you know, we have the microcosm of violence isn't isn't just in Chicago. I mean, we have our fair share of shootings and whatnot and neighborhoods that can be, you know, that aren't all bad. I've always found it interesting that the that when we were when it was really bad back in the would you say the 90s when the gang violence was at its height was that you could go into the housing projects during the day and moms and kids and whatever plane and then at night it becomes.
I mean, you wouldn't recognize it. I mean, you just wouldn't recognize it. So those, you know, it's interesting. I think that your project has great merit and puts what we just talked about, which is the fantasy full world of the Cubs into perspective in some strange way. Even while the Cubs are winning the World Series, all of that is still happening in Chicago. So we go back to covering all of real life, too, after that.
After a sports run. That's exactly right. Hey, man, thanks very much for taking the 53 minutes out of your day to talk to us, and we appreciate it. And we should have this up soon because we haven't podcasted in a while because everybody's been busy, and we wanted to start back with a really big one. So we decided to go for the Addison Russell Grand Slam, and boom, we did. Yeah, thanks a lot. All right, man, thanks very much. We'll talk to you later. Thank you. Okay, bye-bye. The Talking Pictures podcast is produced by Todd Meisner with help from Todd Welvert, Meg McLaughlin, Brian Achenbach, and Gary Crambeck. The music was provided by Kevin MacLeod at www.incomputech.com.
To see some of the photos and videos discussed in our podcast, be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and our blog, talkingpicturespodcast.blogspot.com. The Talking Pictures Podcast is a production of The Dispatch Argus and qconline.com, with special thanks to Laura Frames, Randy Fisk, and Laura Anderson-Shaw. Make sure you never miss a podcast by subscribing to The Talking Pictures Podcast on iTunes or SoundCloud.