RIT’s Big Shot is no small feat.
ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, Rochester, NY

by Julie Elman

© RIT School of Photographic Arts & Sciences

All lit up: Volunteers team up and light the Stockholm Royal Palace with flash units and flashlights.

Imagine lighting a scene with the help of 1,200 assistants. Sound crazy? Not to a couple of Rochester Institute of Technology photography professors who developed an illuminating way to help students understand the power of flash, teamwork and planning.

Twenty years ago, William DuBois, chair of Photographic Arts at RIT’s School of Photographic Arts & Sciences, and Michael Peres, chair of Biomedical Photographic Communications at RIT, created the RIT Big Shot. The annual painting-with-light evening event involves teachers, students and hundreds of volunteers who use flash units or flashlights to illuminate scenes during extended exposures; 23 Big Shots have been created in total and have included an eight-acre cemetery, a baseball stadium and the aircraft carrier Intrepid.

The event was inspired by Sylvania Corporation’s Big Shot promotion from the 1950s, in which thousands of flashbulbs were strung up and fired all at once to illuminate similar large-scale scenes.

“Instead of having wires set it all off, we have to holler, scream and yell, ‘The lens is open! Start flashing!’” says DuBois, “we can shoot digital to see which parts [of the photo] are too bright, which parts are too dim, see what our choreography looks like and then make it work so that it becomes an interesting photograph rather than just a flooded photograph with light.”

DuBois is one of three organizers for the event. The Big Shot Triumvirate, as they call themselves, also includes Peres and Dawn Tower DuBois, a faculty member with the National Institute for the Deaf.

The team sets up three to six cameras—all digital, except for one 4 x 5 camera with film to keep with the original tradition of shooting in large format. The team takes four exposures, the first one a test. Then, using light meters, they determine how much light they want and where they want it. The process continues with shutting off any existing exterior lights. (For example, when shooting the Intrepid, all the lights on the outside of the aircraft are turned off.) After the lights are shut off, people are directed through the use of bullhorns and walkie-talkies. Photoshop is never used to fix an image after the shot is made, DuBois says.

Volunteers for each Big Shot event are recruited through mentions on local radio and television stations and announcements sent to community newspapers. Depending on the location of the shoot, RIT crewmembers will view a site a week to a year prior to the actual shoot date. Since the Big Shot event is not part of RIT’s budget, the organizers count on corporate sponsors to help provide funding for equipment and memento prints for everyone who helps with the shoot.

Of the numerous challenges that have cropped up over the years—ice storms, restless horses attached to wagons, and people aiming their flash toward the ground—one challenge in particular stands out for DuBois. “Getting permission to shoot the Alamo was the biggest hurdle we’ve ever had to cross,” he says.

Knowing that commercial ventures had been turned down for shoots at the Alamo in the past, DuBois pitched the San Antonio project as an educational experience for the city. In the end, the planning and publicity that the triumvirate generated paid off, as more than 1,000 people came out to help light the location. In keeping with the spirit of making the Big Shot a community event, every single volunteer was able to participate in the shoot.

With all the planning that goes into each Big Shot, it’s no wonder the team breaks out a flask of Rumplemints after the last shot is made. “It is all over within 20 minutes,” DuBois says, “usually [after] a year of planning and 20 minutes to orchestrate the entire event. It seems overwhelming, but you do two or three or them, and you start to get pretty good.”

See www.rit.edu/~bigshot/ to get more information about the annual projects, order prints and a history of the Big Shot. The next Big Shot will be held April 13, 2008, at Schoen Place in Pittsford, New York. All are welcome. See the Web site for details.