Photojournalist Reed Hoffmann shares his experience of documenting the Kansas City Chief's Super Bowl victory and the tragedy afterward.
While I photograph the Kansas City Chiefs’ home games during the season, I don’t go along if they make the playoffs or Super Bowl. But that doesn’t mean I’m finished doing assignments involving them. This year, for instance, I was hired to cover their departure from Kansas City to Las Vegas, then the big downtown watch party the night of the game, and finally the victory parade and celebration that went from ecstatic to horrific.This assignment was for theand was the easiest of the three.
Normally, for a big event, I’ll use my ThinkTank roller bag to haul my laptop and camera gear. But this time I wore my cameras and used a backpack for the laptop. I figured a roller bag would be even more difficult to get through what was going to be a very crowded location. For cameras, I used my two Nikon Z 9 cameras, one with the Z 70-200mm f/2.8 lens and the other with either the Z 24-70mm f/2.8 lens or the Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens .
After halftime, it was more of the same, but about halfway through the fourth quarter, I went ahead and slipped into the narrow gap between the fans and the main stage. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to be there, but that’s where the best pictures were, right in front of the fans, with strong emotions riding on every play. I wasn’t the only photographer who did that, and with all the excitement and noise, and the fact that our being there wasn’t creating a problem , we were left alone.
As pandemonium erupted, I used that step on the barrier to use a higher angle to photograph the celebration. Nikon Z 9, Aperture Priority, 1/320 at f/2.8, -.7 EV, ISO 2800, Nikkor Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 17mm. While I arrived a bit before 6am, there were fans who’d arrived even earlier. So once I was set up on the media platform, I took my two cameras, with the shorter lenses, and headed out into the crowd. Today, covering almost any event for a wire service means uploading pictures from before it starts to well after it’s over, so I needed to begin making pictures. My first photos were silhouettes of people before the sun came up.
This shows you the raised media platform I was working from and the distance to the stage. My long lens and camera are on the center tripod, mounted to a gimbal head, and that’s my grey chair in the foreground. Finally, around 1pm, we got people on stage. Yay! Oh, never mind, first the mayor, the governor, the honor guard, the drum team, the cheerleaders… Eventually, at about 1:15pm, the trophies, the owner, and eventually the team made it there. At 1:45pm the speeches were over, the confetti flying while some players partied on the stage and others started to leave. Which meant I was pulling cards from my cameras, downloading, editing, captioning, and transmitting again.
And then one of the organizers came onto our platform and said we might need to move, there’s been an “incident” in Union Station. Huh?
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