The Step Back Q&A: Getty photographer Mike Ehrmann on shooting the NBA bubble

The NBA Bubble has been a new environment for everyone, including the photographers who shoot the games.

The pictures make the game and you might have noticed that the game images from the NBA Bubble look a little different than what we’re used to. Veteran Getty photographer Mike Ehrmann spoke with The Step Back to talk about what’s different and how photographers approach a game, giving us the story visually.

The Step Back: I wanted to talk a bit about what things are like for you right now, you’re in the bubble, correct?

Mike Ehrmann: We’re not technically in the bubble. So we are tier three. Tier one is in the bubble where you have to quarantine and you’re tested every day, like the NBA players and coaches. Those guys are in the bubble. So we get tested twice a week and we shoot all of the games elevated.

That was one of the things I was curious about. We use Getty Images for all our editorial articles. There’s been a really obvious and distinct aesthetic shift in the photos from the bubbles — different angles, different levels of close-ups than we’re used to. And that’s because you’re shooting from a different spot?

Absolutely. We’ve had to take a much different approach to how we shoot games now because we’re used to sitting on the floor, you know, wide lenses, being able to run remotes, things like that where we don’t have access to any of that stuff now. So it’s a lot of long glass, using lenses that we’ve never used at basketball and things we’d normally never do. But it’s the hand that we were dealt and we’re just trying to find ways to tell the story that we’re used to telling, but from a different perspective.

I know you work on other sports. Is the dynamic now more similar to shooting a different sport, like maybe shooting in a football stadium or something like that?

Everything now is kind of similar to what we’re doing with basketball. Like, I had a Rays game last night, same thing. We’re in the stands, kind of far away. Just finding ways to make it work but it’s a much different environment than we’re used to operating in. It presents some challenges because you’re so used to the pictures you normally make that it’s hard for us sometimes to make the pictures we want to make because we’re in a place we’d never normally shoot from. Like in the NBA Finals, we’re usually always one game on the floor and one guy elevated just as secondary coverage but now it’s our only option.

Does the lighting inside the gym and all the digital backgrounds and the digital fans change things as well?

It has. The lighting inside the arenas is not that bad. We’ve really started to dial it in but it took us a while. I was talking to a friend from the NBA and he said the lights that are in the gyms are NBA arena lights but they’re used to being in a normal basketball arena where the lights are 300 feet off the floor, and now they’re like 75 feet off the floor. It created some challenges and it got kind of spotty but we’ve found some ways to make it work. But from a brightness standpoint, it’s not awful. With some of these long lenses and converters some of the stuff we’re shooting is much darker than we’re used to, but we’re making it work. It’s not the worst arena I’ve ever been in, that’s for sure.

From your new angle, what kinds of shots are you looking for? What kinds of things are you trying to capture?

I’m finding that a lot of the stuff that ends up being usable is a lot more on the ground stuff, guys driving, guys dribbling is clean because, as you’re looking at the basket, we’re on the right side of the basket up high. So when they’re driving the lane, that hand is up and it covers their faces. So unless they kind of do a double-pump, pull-down and come back up you don’t see a lot of faces, you get defenders arms and you get blocked on a lot of stuff. So a lot of the things are I find are more usable and cleaner are driving and dribbling and bringing the ball up the court around the NBA logo and the Black Lives Matter logo around the center of the floor.

From that elevated position, we’re just kind of working logos to tell that story a bit, kind of a scene-setter. A lot of the longer stuff is just trying to isolate guys and shoot clean.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the backgrounds seem hard. There’s a real noticeable difference between stuff that has the floor as the background and stuff that has the darker background of the gym backdrop.

Right, they come up the left side of the floor and now it’s all benches and scorer’s table and that stuff is all plexi-glassed off. And you’ve got lines running through guys’ heads and it gets sloppier quickly. So it’s better if they come up the middle or the right side of the floor because then we can keep it cleaner with the floor in the background. But you’re so used to being at their level or even lower than their level, and we tend to shoot long there because when you’re shooting low it tends to make these guys larger up top and more heroic, which is what athletes are. Some from more of a compressed angle when you’re up top like that with just the floor as your background, it’s just a very different image than we’re used to making at a basketball game.

When you’re shooting a game, and I imagine this has changed in the bubble, do you think about certain categories of photos? Like you get the shots that are close up on player, shoulders up. You get these certain kinds of shots in the same poses.

Yeah, as I go through the game I try to check certain boxes. You try to get both coaches, you have to get a couple of coaches’ pictures out. We work shoes pretty hard, just because it tends to be a big seller and there’s a big market for that kind of stuff, there’s a lot of sneakerheads out there. We use a 600-millimeter lens with a 2x converter into a 1200-millimeter lense and that allows me to just kind of do shoe isos during timeouts or free throws. You try and pick some of that stuff off. I want big players coming across the logo. I try to do a couple of pans, which is like really slow shutter speeds of guys driving up, their kind of sharp and the background just wooshes away. I do a couple wide pictures during the anthem, the arena looks nice all flagged out with the players kneeling. You’re always thinking about what else can I do to give some variety. Because of I just post 200 pictures of a guy driving up the floor with a long lens it gets old after a while and it can get very tedious.

Do you ever think about capturing certain players in combination? I know one of the hardest things we’re always looking for editorially is for an article about a specific matchup to find a clean photo that includes both players where they are both in frame and looking at the camera.

Oh, of course. Like if Dame is guarding LeBron, you’re always thinking about those marquee matchups. You’re thinking about guys together, who’s guarding who and can I make a picture where you want both of those marquee matchups in the frame. You understand what the storylines are and you’re looking for how you can tell those because people care about those marquee guys.

How much of the best shots is luck, you just happen to have the camera in the right spot and the guy did the right thing and it all just worked?

A fair bit of it. You could have a big play happen, especially if it’s at the other end of the floor, like some big dunk and there’s a 95 percent chance it’s all backs. So you do have to get lucky. I would love more left-handed players because they can drive to the basket with the left and it opens up their face and I can see what’s going on. So there is a fair bit of luck in that. When you were on the floor, you could really follow the game at both ends, regardless of what was happening. With that taken away from you, it’s hoping that it fits into this little box that I’m trying to put them into where I can see what’s actually happening.

One of the other sets of photos that I love that we find in the Getty database are these shots that look intentionally blurry, maybe a long shutter speed, the player in motion, they look almost impressionistic. I’m assuming those are intentional?

Those are very intentional. I actually put a second exposure on another focus button on the camera set to like a 15th or a 20th of a second to balance that exposure out. And then if I see a guy driving hard I can just go to that other button and start panning with them. It’s difficult and you have to time it well but out of a sequence of six or eight frames, you’re really just hoping for one. And when it’s done well and it works because they’re tack sharp, and the rest of it just falls away in a blur. It’s difficult but it’s something that I really enjoy doing. Panning is something we all kind of work on and it’s just another thing in this environment to show some movement, to show some action, you know something a little bit different.

It’s really hard for us to come out of these games and feel like we’re not making anything unique. Each game I go to, I want to make a picture that I want to put on Instagram, something that I really want to show off and be happy with. It could be a big action play, it could be a lot of emotion. When you feel a little more removed and limited with what you can do, it makes it difficult to come out with something that you really, really like.

Do you look at every image that you shoot from every game?

I do. I do. We’re remote editing everything so I’m choosing what I send to the editor. So I get to kind of edit in camera before it gets to them, and I trust our editors to know what we want things to look like with the way they crop it and the way they’re moving in on these images. I do know what everything is because I’ve kind of seen it twice, at least once with my eye and once with the back of the camera before I send it off to them. I don’t want a picture out there that I don’t want my name on. So we’re all very picky about what we want these pictures to look like as an end result.

Can you tell when you’ve got a winner before you actually look at the image? Do you ever just snap and know that was the one?

Oh, yeah. 100 percent. You know when it happens. You’re like, oh, that was it right there. And then you hit the button on the back of the camera and you’re like, yup, there it is. Throw a little voice caption on it, a little .wav file so the editor knows. And when it’s a really good one, you hear back from them immediately.