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Digital Tools Give New Life to Photos
from the 1970s |
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How a Julius Erving wall started with a 25 year old 8”x10” print
and
ended up as a 13x17 foot mural in Converse’s corporate headquarters.
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Larry Berman with a big
Julius Erving
The largest photograph of Julius Erving ever made |
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Click here to see hundreds
of photographs of Julius Erving (Dr J) |
| Background |
| In the mid 1970s, I combined my passion
for photography with my love of basketball by working as a freelance
sports photographer. My somewhat illustrious career consisted of doing
assignments for the New York Nets, the NBA programs, Converse and
Spalding, and resulted in my images appearing on more than 20 magazine and
book covers and posters. After a few seasons, I left the world of sports
photography to pursue my own personal vision of photography, spending the
next 25 years earning a living selling my fine art photography at art
shows.
My sports shooting past was resurrected in early in 2003
while I was cleaning out the basement and I came across boxes of slides,
prints and old magazines I had kept from the 1970s. Included in the
collection were a few hundred of the best images I had created 25 years
ago. It struck me that today’s technology would now allow me to show and
market my early work as never before. |
| The Project |
 I
started by scanning the 35mm transparency film using a Polaroid Sprintscan
4000 film scanner. The black and white prints were captured with an Epson
Perfection 1640SU flatbed scanner. Over a two-month period, I scanned over
300 images. Each scan needed between one and three hours to clean up and
optimize in Photoshop, including lots of work with the Healing Brush and
Cloning Tool. With today’s superior technology I found that I was able to
make excellent prints ranging from 8”x10” up to 20”x30”. Eventually my
“basketball” folder reached over 40 Gigabytes, necessitating the purchase
of a second hard drive for storage and a DVD burner for back up.
Next, I registered the domain
http://BermanSports.com
and began building a web site that would allow people to find my images
and easily purchase them. To build traffic I began running auctions on
eBay, both driving potential buyers to my site and generating a nice cash
flow to keep the project going. I worked hard to make my site not only
easy for people to use, but optimized for search engines as well. To be
successful I needed to have my site appear when potential buyers searched
for the names of the famous sports stars that I had photographed. |
| How Converse found me |
| This past summer, Chad Smoak, the
marketing director at Converse, contacted me. Converse has an extremely
large office space in North Andover Massachusetts, and was looking to
decorate their many conference rooms with wall size murals of their
contract athletes. They had been looking for something special for their
“Julius Erving Conference Room” when they came across my web site. Score
one for Google and its excellent searching capability. |
| Producing the Wall |
 The
photo that Converse chose happened to be one of my black and white images
for which I did not have the original negative. I scanned an 8x10 print at
full optical resolution of my Epson scanner, which produced a 165-megabyte
file, cleaned it up and sent it to Converse on a CD. John MacNamara of
Advanced Photographics used Photoshop to eliminate the white sign behind
Julius Erving’s head and added information to the top and sides to make
the image proportion fit the wall. He then used Genuine Fractals to
increase the file size to approximately 700 megabytes and printed it in
four 56" sections with a
Vutek 2360 Solvent Printer onto vinyl
wallpaper. The final size of the image was 13x17 feet. It might be the
largest photograph of Julius Erving ever printed. |
| Visiting Converse |
 My
wife Mary and I recently drove to Maine on a shooting trip, giving us a
chance to stop at Converse and see the wall. To take the above photograph,
I set my CoolPix 5000 with it’s built in 28mm lens on a tripod on to of
the conference room table with the camera about seven feet off the floor,
and Mary took the pictures of me standing in front of
the wall, giving it a sense of scale. As a finishing touch, a marker was
furnished and they asked me to sign my photograph. |
| Resources |
http://BermanSports.com
Larry Berman’s web site of 1970’s sports photography:
Vutek
http://vutek.com
Advanced Photographics
a lab that specializes in large format visuals for trade shows |
