Tricking the eye

YORK, Maine -- The Dodgers were playing the Cardinals this spring in an exhibition game at Vero Beach, Fla. Near a concession stand in back of home plate, the owner of the Dodgers, Frank McCourt, chatted with the well-known photographer Ozzie Sweet, 87, who has been covering spring training since Jackie Robinson was a rookie in 1947.

In seven decades, Sweet has focused his lens on America's greatest athletes, from Johnny Mize to Johnny Damon, and on celebrities from Einstein to Eisenhower. His photographs have appeared on more than 1,700 magazine covers, including those of Time, Newsweek, Playboy, TV Guide, and Sports Illustrated.

As McCourt and Sweet swapped baseball lore, a stranger approached, introduced himself as a lawyer from Los Angeles, and proffered his disposable camera to McCourt. ''Would you mind taking a picture of me and my family?"

McCourt laughed and pointed to Sweet.

''Get him to take it. He's an expert."

Setting aside his $5,000 Hasselblad, Sweet took the $10 Kodak and said, ''Which button do I press?"

The lawyer left the ballpark that day, unaware that he was in possession of a snapshot taken by one of the great photographers of the 20th century.

With the 2005 baseball season winding down, Sweet sat in a wooden chair on the wooden deck of his wooden house in a wooded lot not far from the ocean one recent day, and he chuckled at the recollection of that Kodak moment.

For the man who made Einstein laugh, who photographed Hemingway in Cuba, Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc, and Ike in the Oval Office, not to mention Joe Louis, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, John Wayne, Joe DiMaggio, and Grace Kelly, these are the golden days.

After 41 years in Francestown, N.H., Sweet moved here in 2000 with his wife of 30 years, Diane, who is 54. Thanks to a new heart valve and a new hip, he is healthy enough to work full time, still traveling coast to coast on photo assignments, still making the annual pilgrimage to spring training, and still publishing books with his colleague, writer Larry Canale, the latest being ''The Boys of Spring: Timeless Portraits From the Grapefruit League, 1947 to 2005."

''Sit here in the shade," says Sweet, who confesses right off the bat that he's a Yankees fan. ''My wife's a Yankees fan, too," he says in a conspiratorial whisper, ''and so, up here in Maine, we're in enemy territory."

A few minutes later, Canale arrives.

''You're late, Larry, but we're not going to dock you," Sweet shouts, then pauses and apologizes. ''That's pretty corny, isn't it? But I was brought up on a farm, and my humor is not so good."

That farm in upstate New York had plenty of pigs, sheep, and chickens, but no electricity till Sweet was 14. After high school, he studied at the Art Center in Los Angeles, was drafted into the Army Signal Corps during World War II, and in 1942 photographed his first cover for Newsweek, a depiction he created of an American soldier with a knife between his teeth.

Although Sweet has specialized in photographing athletes, particularly baseball players, he is known also for his photographs of wildlife and of celebrities, many appearing on the covers of magazines as popular as The Saturday Evening Post and as arcane as Cat Fancy. To fans of Sport magazine in the 1950s and 1960, Sweet is known for classic renditions of Yogi Berra, Roger Maris, Willie Mays, Ted Williams, and Mickey Mantle.

Many of Sweet's photographs are the result of hours of creative staging in order to convey an image of action, and while the manipulation of photographs violates the ethical standards at most news publications today, Sweet's photographs are admired in a historical context not only for technical quality but for their imagination and inventiveness.

For example, to boxer Floyd Patterson's face, Sweet applied cream to simulate sweat. That deer frozen in front of a hunter aiming his rifle was a stuffed deer. The perfect shot of a golfer knocking the ball out of a sand trap was actually a golfer swinging at sand while a golf ball was suspended by unseen wire in front of Sweet's camera. At the end of World War II, Newsweek published a cover photograph by Sweet of what appeared to be a German soldier, hands raised as if in surrender, but it was actually a friend of Sweet's dressed in a German uniform.

That level of artistic imagination would not survive scrutiny by many editors today.

Sweet smiles.

''See, I never called myself a photographer. What I am -- and in the early days this sounded more impressive -- I am a photographic illustrator. It's a different art form, and certainly different from news photography. What I do is, I start with an empty canvas and create a photo illustration."

One of his photographs shows Yankees slugger Maris with hands outstretched while five baseball bats appear to have been flung in the air above him. It took Sweet three hours to suspend the bats by fishing wire from a crossbar 14 feet high. To get a photograph of Mays completing the swing of a bat, Sweet used wire to support the bat. He then stood on a folding chair and tilted the camera to shoot Mays as he was supposedly looking at a ball disappearing over the wall.

A chapter of the Sweet-Canale book is devoted to the art of getting people to smile.

''One of the secrets of Ozzie's success is that he could get people to feel comfortable and get them to smile naturally," says Canale. ''In the past two years, there have been a couple of times when players didn't understand Ozzie's importance, like Curt Schilling. He turned us down. The normal reaction would be to curse him, but Ozzie's response was to let it roll off his back, to take things in stride and focus on our success, because we were able to get great expressions from Johnny Damon, David Ortiz, and Terry Francona, so Schilling was not a big deal."

Of the two great Yankees outfielders, DiMaggio was difficult, Mantle easy.

''See, some people smile and you may see teeth all right, but they're not smiling with their eyes," says Sweet. ''Whenever I shot Mantle smiling, his eyes were smiling, too. Same with Ted Williams, but DiMaggio? He smiled with his teeth, but not his eyes."

Sweet's photographs are often likened to the paintings of Norman Rockwell, and the comparison is apt, says Canale, editor in chief of Antiques Roadshow Insider.

''Ozzie is an artist, but he uses a camera instead of brush and paint," he says. ''He creates scenes, and nobody has been better at it. He's influenced a lot of photographers, although as you point out, it's a different world today. That's why Ozzie's stuff stands out, because there's a certain charm to it."

What does Sweet remember of the celebrities he's photographed?

Einstein: ''I photographed him in his office at Princeton. He was wearing an old pair of Oxford shoes without laces and the backs of the shoes were broken down so that he could just slide his feet into them as if they were sandals. I had everything set up, the camera on a tripod and my hand on the release, and we were talking about different things, and I told him his shoes were interesting, that I'd never seen anything like them, that they were convenient, and that one of these days, that would be the top fashion. He liked that and laughed, and it made the cover of Newsweek."

Berle: ''He enjoyed being photographed. I photographed him before he was married. Then I photographed him when he was married. Then he divorced, and I photographed him while he was divorced. And then he remarried the same woman, and I photographed him again."

Eisenhower: ''I photographed him when he was a general, when he was president of Columbia [University] and then in the Oval Office when he was president. I had an automatic camera that went click-zzzz, click-zzz, and after the rest of the photographers left, I stayed because I was shooting a Newsweek cover. When he heard the camera buzzing, he came over and asked me to show him everything I knew about it."

Hemingway: ''I photographed him for Cat Fancy. See, he had to have company when he was writing. Dogs were too demanding, so he had cats. My assignment was to photograph him with his 30 cats, all descendants of a single cat."

DiMaggio: ''He'd had it with photographers trying to get him to laugh. I said something like, 'My God, how many years have you been pestered by photographers?' That got a little smile, but no laugh. The Yankees trained at Redington Beach [Fla.], and on a number of occasions, I'd meet him and Marilyn Monroe for breakfast at the Howard Johnson's across from their hotel, the Tides. He ate pretty good, but I never saw Marilyn eat much."

Asked to give one tip to amateurs, those of us who take snapshots instead of photographs and never seem to capture the moment as artfully as the pros, Sweet leans in and speaks once again in that conspiratorial whisper.

''Here's the secret," he says, cupping his hands around his lips. ''Edit out the bad stuff."

Jack Thomas can be reached at thomas@globe.com.