Buffalo Art: CEPA collaborates with RIT on huge-scale photo project

By Maisie Strader
(Image above: The “Big Shot” of Highmark Stadium; it was shot as a 360 degree panorama).

The fans in the stands couldn’t hear the “Click … Click … Click” of the cameras, but they were in the picture as nearly 10,000 people gathered at Highmark Stadium, home of the Buffalo Bills, for an unforgettable photo on Saturday. 

The project was a collaboration of Buffalo’s CEPA Gallery with the Rochester Institute of Technology to commemorate the Bills’ farewell season in their stadium in Orchard Park by capturing the “Big Shot.”

This was RIT’s 37th “Big Shot.” Other projects have included Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., Old Fort Niagara in Youngstown and the Alamo in San Antonio.

With this project, it made sense to work with CEPA (the Center for Exploratory & Perceptual Arts), which has a heavy emphasis on photography.

“What we want the public to know most is that RIT and CEPA are invested in community engagement and photographic education,” said CEPA Executive Director Ben Hickey before the event.

Educational outreach has been a CEPA emphasis for a long time.

 “CEPA was founded in 1974 as part of a UB thesis project. So, we are a class project,” he said. “It’s just a 50-year class project. And so we have a service minded ethos; we are here to help facilitate artists’ visions.”

The Big Shot event has approximately 100 RIT volunteers about around 60 CEPA volunteers to make this dream a reality. 

Even with that strong support, the scale of the event is immense. A crowd of over 6,500 people got tickets and gathered to take part in the experience.

The participants in the stands followed directions on videos played on the big screens in the stadium. The goal? To have everyone moving, waving their phones, and flashlights.

“So there’s an element of you’re a human paintbrush. And the team will be communicating with you, shine your light here. Move in this way,” Hickey said.  

By moving the participants were “erasing” themselves in the stands, intentionally becoming invisible as blurs in the long-exposure shot. The lights caused faces and shapes to disappear, replaced by sweeping strokes of illumination across the stands.

In doing so the audience painted the scene with light, making way for some legendary Bills Mafia fans standing on the field. 

Camera-maker Nikon was a major sponsor of the Big Shot as the project tried some new techniques. 

For the shoot, a Rochester company (Mccrae Industries) created a rig with 24 cameras so they could shoot a full circular panorama.

“On the top, there are 24 cameras, all facing out at a certain degree and leveled very precisely. They are going to be able to take the panoramic picture in the round and 360 degrees simultaneously,” Hickey said.

The total exposure, taken at 8:45 p.m., took 150 seconds (2 1/2 minutes) using 24 Nikon Z 9 cameras. For camera buffs, it was shot with an aperture setting of f/11 and with an ISO of 100.

With all this effort comes a significant amount of pressure: “They only get four opportunities to capture the image, and one of those has to be the one that’s used,” Hickey said.

Early next month, the photos will be available for fans and students alike to see — although there is already a lower-resolution version on the RIT Big Shot website.

The final image can be found early next month on the official Buffalo Bills website; it will also be sold in two different sizes at the Bills shop. 

“I think that there’s a little bit of creative freedom every year (and) I think that it’s a bit opportunistic as well,” Hickey said.

In the very first Big Shot, faculty and students went out at night with flashlights to illustrate painting with light and long exposure photography using large scale architecture. Then the media arrived. That was what started it all.

Maisie Strader is a senior journalism major at SUNY Fredonia. The story is a product of the Arts Journalism class at SUNY Fredonia and the part of the SUNY Institute for Local News. Mia Ciechalski also contribute to this report.