Sudden Impact

Salem’s Tech Imaging developed the super slow-motion camera that won
CBS Sports an Emmy and earned its two principals the ride of a lifetime

By Jeremy Gottlieb

Local boys make good.

It’s a story as old as time, but there is no better way to describe the impact that Salem-based camera company Tech Imaging and its two heads, President and owner Gene O’Connell and Vice President Matt Kearney, have made in the world of televised golf. It was an impact so great, it took O’Connell and Kearney all the way to the grandest stage in all of broadcasting.

Vice President Matt Kearney and President Gene O'Connell of Tech Imaging

“Everyone we talked to, every industry insider, told us not to get our hopes up,” remembered Kearney of the trip to New York he and O’Connell took for the Sports Emmys last May. “We were told we had no chance to win so we figured it would be a good chance to get some free hors d’ouevres and hobnob with some sporting guys. And the next thing you know, they said our name.”

It was the George Wensel Outstanding Innovative Technical Achievement award and it was given to CBS Sports for SwingVision, the technology developed by Tech Imaging using high-speed cameras that shoot images at 40,000 frames per second, allowing viewers to see super slow motion shots of golfers’ swings and the compression of the ball when it is hit by the club.

“It was a shock,” added O’Connell. “We certainly didn’t expect to win it.”

But they did win. And in doing so, they emblazoned the small, homegrown, North Shore company firmly on the map of national sports broadcasting.

Tech Imaging’s road to the Emmy awards began nearly 25 years ago when O’Connell, fresh from a multi-year career at Polaroid, took his severance package and realized a lifelong dream to start his own company. Initially, Tech Imaging provided high speed imaging to a variety of fields, including engineering disciplines, factories, production lines and academia.

“The idea was that if you wanted to really see something so fast that it just couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, we would do it,” explains O’Connell, who began his career with cameras at Polaroid in 1966. “It sounds pretty easy. We just slow things down with the high speed cameras and take multiple pictures per second.”

About eight years ago, O’Connell, having secured a major contract with a nuclear power company, decided that he had the funds to bring on a salesperson. His man was right under his nose in the person of Kearney, his stepdaughter’s husband.

“I started in sales of janitorial and industrial services,” says Kearney, originally from Hingham and a 1992 graduate of Boston College. “We would be sitting around at the holidays and Gene would talk about all of his jobs and it sounded like a lot of field trips. He would be doing things like shooting space shuttle launches and how candy bars were wrapped and so on and I thought that sounded great.”

O’Connell said that with the company expanding at the time thanks to a variety of new technologies springing up, more and more work was coming to Tech Imaging and Kearney fit just what he was looking for. Kearney, who was an English major at BC, said that O’Connell was just the right guy to get him up to speed in the business, so to speak.

“Gene is one of the preeminent experts in this field,” says Kearney of his mentor, who studied with Doc Edgerton, a former professor of electrical engineering at MIT who is widely credited with the invention of the electric flash for cameras as well as work transforming the stroboscope into a device found in most cameras. “Gene worked with Doc Edgerton for many years so I had myself a great teacher.”

O’Connell, who grew up in Charlestown and had set up Tech Imaging’s home base in both Cambridge and Winthrop before moving the business to Salem five years ago, said that high-speed imaging is “not really something you can go to school for. It’s a niche industry. There is no degree for this.” He studied at several schools, including MIT, Wentworth Institute of Technology and the Franklin Institute.

The idea of slowing down a golf swing through high-speed imaging goes all the way back to Edgerton’s use of the strobe and O’Connell said that the embryo for his and Kearney’s work with golf dates back to his time at Polaroid, when he took some high-speed shots of his brother swinging a club. Before pitching their ideas for what would become SwingVision for CBS Sports, Kearney said that some sort of leap in technology was needed.

“We had been doing some stuff at charity tournaments here and there and we knew it was a good idea,” he said, “but we only had black and white images that were of such low resolution that you couldn’t really broadcast them.”

Early in the 2004 golf season, Kearney and O’Connell found that one of the camera companies they represented, Photron, Inc., based in San Diego, had developed a high-speed camera known as an APX that was mega pixel resolution with “decent color and good light sensitivity,” and decided that it was good enough to use in their pitch to the networks.

“I sent a mass e-mail to the networks to let them know that if they were interested in trying this, that it would look very cool,” Kearney said. “And CBS got back to us very quickly.”

Kearney and O’Connell took the camera to CBS headquarters in New York and provided a makeshift demonstration in a conference room using nothing but the camera, a club and a coffee tin full of Christmas cookies.

“We asked them to imagine the club coming around really slowly, told them we could add in the ball being compressed on contact and used as an inset which we drew out on a piece of paper,” said Kearney. “They said ‘Wow, you can do that?’ And they flew us out to the National Pro-Am at Pebble Beach for a test run.”

Kearney and O’Connell gladly accepted the invitation and just days later they were setting up shop on one of golf’s most hallowed courses.

“We found an outlet by the famous 17th hole and started taking some shots,” Kearney remembers.

After a while, someone from CBS came down to look at what they were getting and quickly absconded with Kearney’s laptop to the broadcast truck.

“We were just kind of sitting there,” Kearney recalled. “And the next thing I know, after being told that this was all just a test, they were a bunch a guys pulling cable to where we were and we were told that they were putting some stuff on the air. And then, at the beginning of the final round on Sunday, this guy came up to us and said, ‘I’ve been told that you aren’t going home, you’re coming with us to San Diego for the next tournament.’”

The whirlwind brought O’Connell and Kearney to Torrey Pines and by the outset of that event, CBS had officially named the high-speed shots SwingVision, given them a logo and, as Kearney said, “even theme music by Yanni.”

The network liked what Tech Imaging had brought so much, that a deal was quickly in place for the remainder of the 2004 season and SwingVision even had a sponsor, making it a revenue producer, not just overhead. O’Connell and Kearney trained a couple of CBS employees on how to use the cameras and began to send one of their own employees, Justin Hall, on the road to every CBS-televised event. Kearney said that the first season was basically on the job training.

“We had to learn the broadcast world and how this all could fit in,” he says. “These are scientific cameras meant to be in a lab or a closed environment. It took a lot of time, money and tweaking. We were feeling it all out, trying to get familiar.”

Kearney said that by midway through the second season of SwingVision, knowing exactly when they’d be on air, what the best holes at each event lighting-wise would be, and with enough people trained to run the cameras properly, they “got into their groove.” One of the biggest champions of SwingVision at CBS was on-air analyst Peter Kostis, the teaching pro who has been a commentator with the network since 1994.

“Before, we always had to imagine what the club did, but with SwingVision, we could really see what the club does and doesn’t do at impact, which for me, as a teacher, was really exciting,” says Kostis, who operates the Kostis-McCord teaching center in Scottsdale, Ariz. with fellow CBS analyst Gary McCord and also has local ties as the owner of a summer home in Falmouth, Maine near Falmouth Country Club. “It’s amazing, really. I get at least a dozen e-mails a week from viewers commenting on SwingVision. It’s by far the most popular segment of the telecast. There’s a reason we won the Emmy with it.”

The segment wound up becoming so popular with the viewing audience that CBSSportsline.com has started taking requests from the general public on what kind of shots they would like to see SwingVision take on the golf course.

Not everyone on Tour was exactly thrilled with Tech Imaging’s innovation, though. While players such as Brad Faxon and Billy Andrade loved the way they could analyze their swings by watching the replays, the biggest name in golf – and his caddie – objected to the camera being around them, and went out of their way to make life difficult for the Tech Imaging personnel.

“There are those that love it and those that hate it,” said Kearney. “Some guys will run around and look [at the replay on the monitor], especially in the early rounds. Then there’s Vijay, who seems totally annoyed with it, but puts up with it. And Mickelson gets slightly bothered because there’s a commotion when we swing around to the other side because he’s a lefty. And Tiger, back when he was re-working his swing, didn’t like some of the criticism that he was getting so for a season and a half, while he was reworking his swing, his caddie Stevie Williams, would come over and park himself and Tiger’s bag right in front of the camera.”

Kostis concurred with Kearney.
“All of the players love the technology, I’ve even had players tell me they saw their swing on SwingVision and then went back to work on some changes because of what they saw,” adds Kostis, who has instructed more than 125 PGA, LPGA and Senior PGA Tour pros, including Jack Nicklaus. “But there’s no question that some of them don’t like to have their swings analyzed. But that just comes with the territory. When it first came out Tiger was going through some swing changes and he got a little touchy. But that’s old news now and it has subsided.”

Despite not receiving immediate admiration from Tiger, SwingVision was nominated for an Emmy in 2004, but lost out to some slow-motion work used by NBC in their Summer Olympic coverage that year. But thanks to some additional technology developed with a software company that included calculations of club speed, velocity and launch angles with the existing images, a second nomination was awarded in 2005, which resulted in the win. Now, in addition to moving SwingVision into the realm of high-definition television, O’Connell and Kearney have done some high-speed imaging work for other broadcast sporting events, including U.S. Open tennis for CBS, Major League Baseball, surfing, auto racing and Summer and Winter X Games for ESPN and other golf work for the Golf Channel. The two said that Tech Imaging has a year-to-year agreement with CBS and that it is their largest rental contract.

“The company has sort of split into two sides,” says O’Connell. “The golf is the tent pole of the broadcast side and the other side is use of high-speed imaging for engineering and scientific applications. What we do is selling and distribution, our rental program and consulting jobs. The broadcast side is a hybrid of those last two things.”

Kearney, who attended all the tournaments in the early stages but now only travels to the first telecast of the season and the Majors that the network covers, stressed that what Tech Imaging has done isn’t anything new. It all goes back to Doc Edgerton and his work as far back as the 1930s and was always a fascination, but because of the limitations of the technology and the fact that it took so long before such work could be done without using film, it seems so new now.

But O’Connell remembered when he was at Polaroid, making high-speed movies to figure out why an old-fashioned pack camera had a light leak, that it would be an excellent tool for all kinds of work, including broadcasting sports.

And what does the 40-year veteran of the industry see for his company in the future?

“I think I want Matt to have more jobs,” says O’Connell. “So that I can retire and play more golf.”