Get The Picture

TigerBlog was talking to Shelley Szwast yesterday.

If you're seen a picture of Princeton men's or women's hockey or men's or women's lacrosse in a home game in recent years, there's an excellent chance it was taken by Shelley.

In fact, during the overlap between the two sports, Shelley is something of a fixture for weekends at a time in both venues. There are even times where three and possibly even all four teams are home in the same weekend.

So what did Shelley say yesterday? That she missed the days of shooting give games in a weekend.

That's how it is for the people who work in college athletics. They get swamped during the year, especially when it's crossover season, but when they certainly have missed it these last few months.

Heck, they miss it during a normal summer.

Shelley is an outstanding photographer, especially for someone who is a photographer as mostly a hobby.

TB has worked with a lot of photographers in his time at Princeton. The person who has taken by far the most pictures of Princeton athletics all these years is Beverly Schaefer. In fact, TB would go so far as to say Beverly has seen more Princeton athletic events than anyone else in the last 20 years.

There have been a lot of really good pictures taken of Princeton games through the years, by many different photographers. Some photographers who have turned out to be great ones - such as Patrick Tewey and Brian McWalters - have just emailed out of nowhere to see if Princeton needed pictures at a certain event.

The photography process has changed a lot since TB first began, but the bottom line is that a great sports photo is still a work of art. The need for quality pictures has also changed dramatically.

Back when TB first started, the main need for pictures was for media guides. Because almost every picture used back then was black-and-white, almost no games were shot with color film.

Oh year. Film. This was before digital photography. When photographers shot games, they'd have actual film to load in their cameras, and when a roll of film was done, it had to be developed.

This required sending the film to a company that the Office of Athletic Communications had a deal with, a company in West Windsor called the Leigh Photographic Group. There was delivery person who would come and get the unprocessed film, and then a few days later a bunch of negatives would appear.

Then it would be up to the OAC contact to go through the negatives and find the pictures that appeared to be usable - appeared to be, that is, because until prints were actually made, there was no way to be 100 percent sure.

So then the next step was to get prints made. And the picture that you thought was perfect on the negative turned out to be blurred, or it wasn't even who you thought it was, or something else that made it unusable. That was frustrating.

Or worse, you had the absolute perfect picture, but it was black-and-white, so you couldn't use it for the media guide cover.

Of course, none of that takes into account that to the picture then had to be sized to a certain percentage to fit a certain space in a publication and then sent over to campus printing to be scanned. TB spent a lot of time riding around between Leigh, Jadwin and campus printing (which was then in the Forrestal campus) in those days.

Today the need for photography can't possibly keep up with the demand, thanks to the advent of social media. The challenges are, as TB said, much different.

These days, and for the last 15 years or so, everything has been digital. The quantity of pictures has skyrocketed, since it's so easy to shoot and then forward them.

The Princeton Athletics Twitter feed started a contest yesterday to choose the best picture of the 2019-20 academic year. The contest will continue for a month, as the 33 pictures that represent all of the programs gets whittled down to the winner.

Make sure you check it out. It figures to be fun.