Dan Higgins
Enterprise Editor
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If you’ve ever tried to photograph your kids blowing out birthday candles, or take a phone shot of the moon rising like a silver dollar over the city skyline, you’ve wrestled with the basic problem of night pictures: there’s never quite enough light, and what light you do have is in all the wrong places.
Now scale that problem to a 71,000-seat football stadium and replace the candles and moon with 10,000 human beings holding flashlights. How would you do it?
That’s the premise of Rochester Institute of Technology’s “Big Shot,” a long-running experiment in “painting with light” that turns a crowd into one giant, collaborative flashbulb. On Oct. 11, RIT students and faculty will aim their lenses inside Highmark Stadium for up to four long exposures, and ask Western New Yorkers to help make a unique portrait of a place that’s about to exit the stage.
The Big Shot began in 1987 as a teaching exercise by three faculty members. The project has grown and now includes a portfolio of unique, nighttime photos of landmarks all over the place, including the USS Intrepid in New York City, the famous Churchill Downs racecourse in Kentucky, and the Susan B. Anthony House not far outside of Rochester.
Highmark will be No. 37 in the series. The timing is not subtle. With a new stadium rising across the street for 2026, RIT and Buffalo’s CEPA Gallery partnered with the Bills to make this special image. Tickets are free and capped at 10,000. Nikon, a longtime Big Shot sponsor, plans to hand flashlights to the first 6,000 through the gates. It’s billed as a family-friendly event.
When you enter, ushers will direct you to a section where people will be seated in every other row. On cue, everyone will “paint” the empty rows by aiming their beam downward and moving laterally in their seat row so the light spreads evenly.
“We want to alternate lines of light and darkness,” says Eric Kunsman, the RIT professor coordinating the shoot. Kunsman said the pattern of lit row, dark row, lit row, creates contour and depth when the exposure stacks up over 60 seconds.
The main camera rig will sit just off the midfield logo. It is a custom array built to record a true 360-degree panorama of the interior. More photographers will be perched on the stadium’s roofline, shooting in the direction of the field and stands.
If you go, you won’t see the photograph as it’s being made. You’ll see constellations of flashlights sliding along empty rows of seats and the stadium’s graying hardscape. The image lives inside the camera and will be built up as the light accrues. That’s the magic of long exposure photography: it reveals a version of reality your eyes can’t assemble on their own, with layers of light built up like layers of watercolor paints.
Talking about layers of light inside a building layered with memories risks getting misty about some old concrete. It doesn’t have to. To me, it’s an opportunity to acknowledge an underappreciated truth, that places only gather meaning from use.
Light, layered properly, creates an image. Time, layered accidentally, creates a place.
The price tag for the Bills’ stadium has soared to more than $2.1 billion – with the team picking up all the cost overruns. It’s dropped the public funding portion of the project by over 20%.
Here’s one layer, small as it is. It is Sunday, Sept. 18, 1983, and I’m in third grade. My father takes me to what’s then called Rich Stadium to watch the Bills play the Baltimore Colts. The box score says it was 60 degrees and breezy. My mother dresses me as if I’ll be traveling by dogsled. The Bills win, 28–23. Joe Cribbs scores three touchdowns – two rushing and one on a pass from Joe Ferguson. It’s six months before the Baltimore Colts skipped town for Indianapolis.
I don’t remember the touchdowns. I remember the hot dog. I remember the men’s room, which longtime patrons will recognize from a single word: trough (and that’s enough said). I remember walking through the concourse with my dad when a celebrity approached. It was Buffalo Mayor James D. Griffin, probably en route to his seat. My father said, “Hello, Mayor.” Griffin gave him a nod and a tap on the shoulder. Without slowing, Griffin replied, “Hiya, Higgs.” I was stunned. Dad chuckled. My father explained that Griffin knew my uncles, and probably recognized my dad as a little brother he’d seen from time to time. Griffin was also a savant when it came to remembering names and faces.
But that was the moment that stuck: not the score, not the standings. Just a brief exchange in a crowd and the feeling of shock that someone whose face I recognized from television, recognized my dad.
It’s such a small thing, a tiny piece of a layer of memory. But that’s how most stadium memories are: a shoulder tap, a laugh, the spontaneous high fives from strangers when the Bills do something worth celebrating. A community photograph can’t resurrect those hours, but it can hold a frame where people can point and say: There’s the spot in the 300s where I paid $8 at the last minute to watch E.J. Manuel have a tragic outing against the Dolphins. But it was also the first time I took my son to a Bills game. Another small layer among an infinity of others built up over the last 53 years.
What does my son remember from that day? Only one thing: a sheriff’s deputy escorting a handcuffed patron down the upper level’s steep steps.
Sophia Buonpane, an RIT photojournalism major who spent this summer as an intern shooting for The Buffalo News, will be set up with her camera on the roofline alongside a Bills photographer. She will have the best view that isn’t a seat. Sophia, a junior, is a skilled sports and news photographer, and she knows what a night like this can do for a student portfolio. But like everyone else, she’s also part of the crowd.
“It’s exciting to be a part of it,” Buonpane said. “It’s creating an image you can’t see until they put it all together.”
If you want in, you may still snag a free ticket by the time you read this. Bring a flashlight, or get there early and take one from Nikon. Bring the family. In the dark, in the quiet, in that odd pause before the click and after the cheer, you’ll help make a photograph of a place you may never walk into again. It won’t look like what you saw. That’s the point. It will look like time.
Dan Higgins is an editor and columnist.
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Dan Higgins
Enterprise Editor
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