The Mark Zibert Effect

Though known for his epic, post-heavy sports shots, photographer-turned-director Mark Zibert is a sucker for capturing the magic in-camera. He achieves this through meticulous planning, preparation and clever tricks – for Nike’s Vapor Trail it was the sublime simplicity of a slanting set, for a 2012 Paralympics project he used tricky maths to figure out camera angles for a one-take film. Tim Cumming meets a master of movement with Boy Scout tendencies.

His 90s apprenticeship was in traditional film spliced with early Photoshop, and while his reputation is as a wizard of big-production, post-heavy, in-the-moment, sports-based shots and spots, Mark Zibert will go that extra mile to get as much of that wizardry in-camera, in the moment and on the spot, before the adventures in post begin.

“I recently shot a portrait of Margaret Atwood,” the Toronto-born, raised and based director tells me, talking from a multi-location shoot for Nike Russia, currently touching down in LA. “I hadn’t shot film in years and I was commissioned by Bullett magazine in New York to take a portrait, and thought it would be really cool to approach it differently. She wasn’t the kind of woman you’d want to photograph with a digital SLR and just snap away. That wouldn’t be the right approach, so I used a 4x5 camera, and brought ten pieces of film with me. I hadn’t shot with a camera like that since school, but I thought it would be a really cool way to take her portrait, because you really have to compose it. You can’t just look through your viewfinder and take a shot,” he laughs. “And it was a good way to work with her. I’m really happy with the results. I think she appreciated that approach too.”

Subscribers to shots.net can read the full interview here or in the new issue of shots magazine, issue 145. To subscribe to shots click here.