Response: my research on Sports Illustrated

I found the historical perspectives assignment to be a lot of fun. I critiqued Sports Illustrated in the 1960s, which the class will hear about next Tuesday, and one of the most interesting things about SI during that time was their innovations in color sports photography. At the start of the 1960s, color sports photography was still an experiment, and mostly everything that ended up in SI at that time was black and white. But by the mid-1960s, however, SI began to look into faster printing processes, and that allowed developments in sports photography, because at the time costs could run upwards of a quarter of a million dollars per page to process a color photo 36 hours or less after it was taken so it could run timely in the magazine! That is a lot of money now, and it was even more then. It's interesting to look back at that because today all a photographer has to do is plug his or her camera into a computer and the images are downloaded instantly. And they were struggling with color photos only about 40 years ago! It's amazing how far sports photography, and photography in general, has come.