Reggie Miller, Knick Killer, is the banner image. After he became a Pacer and was a nightmare for my beloved Knicks, he really made me hate him. However, I took a great picture of him in college.
My brother Mike Corrado of Nikon inspired this blog. He has been my friend for more than thirty years. As a photog with incredible talent, he has been through many iterations, starting as a rock and roller guy and a baseball shooter, and now as a man who passionately loves winged creatures. His Instagram account mikethebirdnerd has the following photo. He mentions that the pic was created from two NEF files and edited in camera using image overlay. Simply stunning.
This was what I saw and thought. Z9, matched with long glass. Amazing talent combined with amazing camera tech.
I thought back to the LIFE story “Spaceman of the year”, which was about the legends of Mike Foale. Foale had survived the space mission many consider the most hazardous. He was onboard MIR (the Russian space station) when it was hit by a resupply ship. Foale used science and grit to make a six-hour EVA walk to fix the damage.
Galveston Bay in Texas made the portrait. The moon was taken in a Syracuse parking lot. The Foale assignment was coming up, so I was already chewing on it. I was freezing cold in upstate NY when I saw the moon and took a Kodachrome photo of it. I measured the film lead before it was spooled into my camera and marked it using gaffer tape. When I finished the roll, I rewound….carefully. I carried the roll with me to Houston and l led it again into the camera…carefully. I had a ballpark for the position of the moon in my frame. I positioned Mike and a light and waited until dusk to shoot the above on one roll.
What does Reggie Miller have to do with a bird, a moon in Syracuse, and an astronaut on a dock?
Three point rule was introduced in college basketball the year I suggested to Sports Illustrated that these “shot from deep space” basketball marksmen could be blasted off a trampoline and bounced into the cosmos using a front projection technique. This was back when SI had more sense than money, and they kind of agreed.
The screen is highly reflective and populated with millions upon millions of glass beads, front projection relies on it. The screen’s reflective qualities are amazing if you are exactly on the screen’s axis. You can’t see anything if you are off-axis. I rented a projection unit powered by a 3,000WS strobe and the largest front projection screen in Hollywood. NASA space imagery was borrowed, and we were off to the celestial places. As I recall, the screen was so heavy and cumbersome that Flying Tigers air cargo specialists were needed to zoom it across the country.
Reggie …. had to be lit carefully. There were many gobos, scrims and cutters. Flags abound. My strobe light couldn’t touch the screen. Any scattered light on the screen would cause a reflected image to appear. Roger McClendon is the same deal.