Miles Myerscough-Harris got these photos developed and published before the game had even finished.
While most film shooters have to wait days, weeks, and sometimes even months to get their film back from the lab, Miles Myerscough-Harris of Expired Film Club recently shot an NFL game and posted the photos on Instagram before the game ended.
An entire film lab had to be constructed and deconstructed in less than 12 hours for the Cincinnati Bengals game at Miami Dolphins on December 21.
Myerscough-Harris was asked by the Dolphins to come and shoot the team’s 60th anniversary game on film cameras. He enlisted the help of Miami film lab Coastal, which processed the Myerscough-Harris’s film during the game. The technician, Alex, even custom-built a film drying unit, just for this particular job.
The Dolphins wanted to be able to post the photos before the game ended. So Coastal Film Lab and Myerscough-Harris set up the makeshift lab in a break room. The team also enlisted the help of Ashton, whose job it was to run the film between the photographer and lab.
To post the photos online, they have to be scanned. For that job, a technician named Angela, operating a Noritsu scanner, was on-hand to scan the freshly-developed film. Myerscough-Harris also enlisted the help of a second shooter, Fabio.
“I went onto the field, kind of bricking it at the possibility of all the things that might go wrong during this,” says Myerscough-Harris.
After capturing the players emerging from the tunnel, Myerscough-Harris took his cameras, including a Canon F-1 and a 6×6 Pentacon Six TL, on the sideline and started shooting the action. As halftime approached, Ashton ran down at least three rolls of film.
“[I’m] absolutely delighted with how these photos turned out,” says Myerscough-Harris. “I cannot believe we managed to do it. We came in, set up an entire film lab, developed, scanned, and posted the photos on social media in collaboration with the Dolphins before the game had even finished.”
Miles Myerscough-Harris
“[An] absolutely outstanding effort from the entire team,” the photographer continues. “Thank you so much to everybody from Coastal, the AAA team, and to Fabio for helping me shoot. An absolutely stunning job by everybody involved and by the end of the day we were absolutely knackered.”
What is remarkable is that this is how professional sports photographers operated every weekend before the advent of digital.
“Shooting film and the constraints of development time and deadline were all we knew,” says photographer Bob Croslin.
“It was fun but so stressful that burnout among sports photographers was pretty common. When digital photography arrived, most newspaper photographers embraced it because it took much of the stress of post-processing out of the mix.
“As cameras got better, reliable AF, larger sensors (6-10 megapixels!), ISO 800 and large CF cards (256 MB!), there was no looking back.”
Myerscough-Harris recently shared tips and advice for photographers traveling through airports.
Image credits: Photographs by Miles Myerscough-Harris / Expired Film Club