In the Blink of an Eye

He may have had a long career as an N.B.A. photographer, but Nathaniel S. Butler also successfully captures with words the old thrill of working with film.

“I remember running out of the arena immediately after the game to a hotel to develop the film, to find out if I did, in fact, get Magic’s ‘junior, junior skyhook’ in frame,” he writes in the preface to “Courtside,” a new coffee-table book showcasing his 40 years on the job, in this case as a newbie documenting the most famous basket of the 1987 finals, by Earvin (Magic) Johnson of the Lakers over the Celtics’ legendary big men, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish. 

“The adrenaline was flowing. I hoped I got it. I thought I got it. I didn’t want to jinx it until I actually developed the film. When I held up that film and saw a frame like that, it was just a big sigh of relief. I did it. I captured a historic moment like that. And then I felt the rush. There’s nothing like that rush.”

The smallest of small-fry media types will recall, fondly or not, such anticipation. 

“Courtside” is a handsome reward and tribute for a working photographer, one who went from N.B.A. intern to starting N.B.A. Photos, the league’s in-house still photography department. As such, the book mixes action shots, especially thundering dunks (John Starks rising high over an assortment of Chicago Bulls), with portraits (a smiling Bill Russell flashing more championship rings than his fingers can handle) and champagne-soaked title celebrations (many from when they were looser and more fun, before all the careful plastic sheeting and protective ski goggles).

And then, of particular interest, the quiet, candid moments, like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen sitting in conversation after their 1998 title, flanked by bottles of bubbly, stogies smoldering, Jordan looking over at Pippen either inquiringly or skeptically. Probably both.

Naturally, Jordan — hard, inscrutable, for so many years a dominant force willing Bulls championships into being — figures prominently, whether soaring from the foul line at a slam dunk contest or joining the “dream team” of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Just as naturally, in a volume in which we hear from dozens of players, he is not one of them.

In a career that focused on Madison Square Garden, Butler was not just a recorder, but an innovator, from “high-quality strobe” lighting to “a multi-camera remote triggering system.”

Of course like everyone else he transitioned to digital, but it’s not exactly something you rhapsodize about. Instead, he takes the time and space in the preface to note that “I had to manually focus the lens. I had to manually set the exposure. I had to ‘click’ one frame at a time. . . . It was much more of a cerebral approach.”

Back in those early hotel rooms, he’d set up his own darkroom, “hoping not to knock my knee into the side of the toilet, hanging rolls of film with clothespins on the shower rod above the bathtub,” staying up all night in the process.

And in that way is character revealed.

Nathaniel S. Butler grew up in Montauk and now lives in Springs.