Sunday, 9/12/10: NFL Season Begins

The New York Times Magazine kicks off the 2010-2011 season with a story featuring the New York Jets and their larger-than-life head coach, Rex Ryan. The piece's exciting photographs, by Levon Biss, create a heroic fiction—the only kind of story telling that true NFL fans will submit to. Biss is an expert at this kind of photography. (See his website.)

I'm guessing Biss was using HDR (high dynamic range) photography, which digitally combines several separate exposures to capture a greater range of tonal detail than a single exposure could. Since we started seeing HDR a few years ago it has gone from awesome to way overused. But if ever there were subjects worthy of HDR, it would be Jet linebackers David Harris and Bart Scott and safety Jim Leonhard.

High-dynamic defense men Harris, Scott, and Leonhard

Or am I mistaken? What do you think the effect is here? And do you think it works? At any rate, let's try to enjoy the season, because the sports-talk media is full of chatter about a lockout next year as owners try to bust the NFL players' union.