MLB Baltimore Orioles Catcher Matt Wieters for ESPN the Mag
It’s not very often you see a 6’5″ MLB catcher. Catchers are not traditionally really tall. They also don’t usually catch for 7 or 8 innings and then close the 9th as a pitcher, which he did all through college at Georgia Tech, and for Stratford High School outside my home town of Charleston, SC. He also knocks the cover off the ball and bats 3rd in the line-up, and on defense he throws more guys out at 2nd from home than anyone else in the league. He takes it very seriously.
We shot Wieters during Spring Training outside of Sarasota, FL for both the magazine and ESPN’s website. We used this job as an experiment with RED EPIC camera to see what kind of still file was really possible with a RED camera and also shoot a piece for the website. We shot at 5k res @ 96 frames a sec. using Zeiss Super Speed cinema lenses and pulled the stills through RED’s software. Seeing a still for 96 frames in a sequence is pretty crazy, but we felt the images were slightly soft and could not be pushed any larger 9″ x 13″ @ 300dpi. Up close stills were much more impressive off the Red, but a 6’ 5″ baseball player was pushing it without turning the camera on it’s side. We made some nice files from the camera but they required extensive work and don’t enlarge very well. We also experienced overheating from the EPIC while in the midst of our interview, effectively stopping the shoot and refusing to work after several reboots. Matt was cool and we continued shooting on the DSLR video rigs we have with 5D’s and 7D’s.
We also shot it on our trusty Canon Mark III camera at a turtle like (compared to the RED) 10 fps. We lit with HMI’s once again avoiding the headache of strobes, which we did use for portraits.Â
I really enjoyed talking with Matt, we come from the same area and had a lot of things to go on about. The guys from the team said they had never seen Matt talk that much. They had a great season and he was a big part of it making it into the playoffs against the Yankees and taking the series all the way to Game 5.
Thanks to the Baltimore Orioles staff, and the photo dept. at ESPN.
©2012ChrisMcEniryPhotography
