Grants:Project/Rapid/TonyTheTiger/McDonald's All-American Boys Game
(The funds will be needed for the 2017 McDonald's All-American Boys Game which will occur on around March 29, 2017)
Please see the sample Equipment application before drafting your application.
Project Goal[edit]
Choose one or more of the following goals. You can add or delete goals as needed. You can add details to each goal. For example, if you want to add content on a specific subject.
- Add or improve content
For the last 4 years, I have attended the McDonald's All-American Boys Game (McDABG) as a photographer for Wikipedia. I have used modest camera equipment to produce images that have been used in a wide variety of highly viewed pages. In recent years these images have been prominently used in numerous basketball related articles. A good example of these uses is this set of images that were the main image for biography articles of players drafted in the NBA draft on the day that they were drafted. This day and the surrounding days are days when such players' pages are quite highly viewed. For example this pageview summary from June 2016 shows the three top draft choices in the 2016 NBA draft. For each of these pages one of my images was the main image on that players page during that month and these three players had over 750,000 pageviews during the month. These images are not only used on player biography pages, but also the article for that season's McDABG such as 2015 McDonald's All-American Boys Game, team season articles such as 2015–16 Michigan State Spartans men's basketball team, conference season articles such as 2015–16 Big Ten Conference men's basketball season, and other uses.
This set of subjects that I shoot (up and coming basketball players) are subjects for which freely-licensed imagery has historically been difficult to come by. By producing the content, I have been able to provide projects like WP:BBALL, WP:NBA and WP:CBBALL with quality imagery for pages that are important to those projects and readers of the subject matter. I am motivated to be able to attempt to provide higher quality imagery for these highly prominent subjects. With the current equipment that I own, I am able to produce images of modest quality, but not WP:FP quality. I believe that the quality of the imagery that I could produce with better equipment would be superior to the images that I have taken in the past. Professional caliber photography equipment for sports action photography is very expensive (e.g., a Canon EOS-1D X Mark II lists at $5,999 and a Canon EF 400mm lens f/2.8L IS II USM lists at $9,999). I hope to rent such equipment for a day to assess the caliber of results that I could produce with equipment better than that which I own (better than my Canon EOS 7D Mark II, a $1,799 list price body, and Canon EF 70–200mm lens f/2.8L IS USM, a $1,999 list price lens).
Project Plan[edit]
Activities[edit]
Tell us how you'll carry out your project. Be sure to answer the following questions:
1. What content gaps will you be filling with the equipment?
- As I have stated above the images are likely to be used in a broad array of articles on English Wikipedia and likely in similar articles on other Wikipedias. I will be producing images that will be important for readers of the subject matter because free images are not available. In addition to providing a reservoir of media for broad use in a wide variety of projects, these images will be used for several types of pages on English Wikipedia including the following types of pages:
- Biographies for at least a short period of time as the main image (e.g., Ben Simmons) and for a longer period of time (possibly forever) as supporting images (e.g., D'Angelo Russell).
- Team season articles (e.g., 2015–16 Michigan State Spartans men's basketball team or 2015–16 Duke Blue Devils men's basketball team)
- Conference season articles (e.g.2015–16 Big Ten Conference men's basketball season or 2014–15 Atlantic Coast Conference men%27s basketball season
- McDABG articles (e.g., 2015 McDonald's All-American Boys Game)
- NBA draft articles for a few years (e.g., 2016 NBA draft)
2. What activities will you organize in the next 6 months to create content and use it on Wikimedia projects?
- I'll be attending the 2017 McDonald's All-American Boys Game
3. How will the equipment be shared/tracked/cared for by members of your community?
- I will use equipment rented by the grant for a one day photography session as a solo photographer.
4. How long will the equipment be used, and by whom?
- The equipment will be used for one day by me.
5. Is there anything else you want to tell us about this project?
Impact[edit]
How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets and feel free to add more:
- Number of photos uploaded
- 200
- Number of photos used on Wikimedia projects
- 30-40
- Number of articles created/improved
- Immediately, I would expect the images to be used in 50-60 articles on English Wikipedia, but over time the images will be used in a variety of language wikipedia articles (see Ben Simmons) and maybe 100 articles on English Wikipedia.
Resources[edit]
What resources do you have? Include information on who is organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).
- I have a monopod, monopod adapter, compact flash card, camera bag and sd card. I am not receiving any support from other sources.
What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense and include a total amount.
- I will need to rent a Canon EOS-1D X Mark II and a Canon EF 400mm lens (the 2.8L IS II USM version). I may need a special equipment bag for this lens. I will also need to purchase a specific theft and damage insurance policy for this gear.
- Based on current prices at https://www.lensrentals.com
- Canon EOS-1D X Mark II -$196
- Canon EOS-1D X Mark II damage and theft protection - $45
- Canon 400mm f/2.8L IS II - $262
- Canon 400mm f/2.8L IS II damage and theft protection - $63
- Shipping -$30
- Total $596
Endorsements[edit]
- Support I talked about this with Tony at WikiConference North America in San Diego in October 2016. I have already been familiar with Tony's work for some years. He has provided Wikipedia with some of its best sports photography, and I like the precedent he has established for sharing photos from high-profile sports events. I know that Tony is more knowledgeable about photography than typical Wikipedia contributors and when he explained to me the difference between sports photography taken with high-quality general use cameras (which he uses already) versus even higher quality cameras which can capture multiple images per second as needed during fast movements of a sports game, it became apparent to me that the Wikipedia community has not yet begun to have important conversations about what it means to collect high-quality sports photography. I support this project for several reasons, including Tony's history of having community conversations about what he does, his history of uploading large numbers of well-sorted photos to Commons, his ability to get into events and take his place with media professionals there, and the likelihood of this proposal being achievable as a progression of what Tony already has been doing in the Wikimedia community. The content that Tony would produce in this project would be useful in itself, and also useful for furthering conversation about how Wikipedians join events as media representatives whether with complicated cameras or even at a more casual level. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:15, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
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