I’ve known Matt for a couple years and followed him through 2 football and 2 baseball seasons. In fact, over the years our family and his family have become very good friends. Below are a few of the images that I’ve shot of Matt over the years. Good luck to Matt as he moves on to his college studies and college baseball.
This was an awesome shoot. It was a hot day, just before sundown. Jordan and I set up our studio lights on the track. We used a battery system which is easily capable of powering four of our strobes. When Kevin arrived, all he needed to do was what he does so well, run. He stretched, warmed up, and made two test passes so that I could adjust my position as Jordan made final adjustments to the strobes. Kevin made around 15 full speed passes. We shot one frame per pass. We nailed the shot!
Above is our March 2010 mailer. It features a Sports Portrait (or Sportrait) of Austin Dodge. Austin was Skyview high school’s starting quarterback for the 2009 season. He will be playing at Central Washington University next year. I will be shooting another portrait of Austin along with the Skyview Football head coach Steve Kizer next week.
Anyone that has tried to shoot sports at indoor venues knows how hard it is to make good images. The lighting is normally very limited. To overcome the lack of light, photographers use camera bodies with high ISO capabilities and fast lenses. An alternative would be to use a flash. The problem with on-camera flash is that images look very flat and 2 dimensional.
This week I decided to strobe some wrestling and basketball. In the old days, we set up 4 studio strobes at indoor venues. The set-up was a bit time consuming. Jordan and I were short on time so we used two lights (Nikon SB800). Set-up was very quick and we were able to use an ISO of 800 rather than 3200.
Here are 2 example images.
This post contains more sports portraits (or sportraits as many now call them) from a shoot mentioned in this previous post. While so many think that this is a new style of lighting and several photographers are willing to claim it as their discovery, I was actually using this three point lighting back in the mid ’80s. Who invented it? I don’t know but my inspiration came from the illustrations in the comic books that I read as a kid.
Jordan and Ryan have grown up with my camera pointed at them. I guess it’s only fitting that they eventually became photo assistants. And now at ages 18 and almost 20 they are excellent photo assistants. It wasn’t our plan to have them work in the family business but they wanted to work. It was more for the sake of earning spending money than it was to learn the business but looking back at the way things turned out, I’m glad they made the decision they did. I get to spend time with my sons, sometimes on easy gigs and sometimes solving complex lighting problems. The thing that I am most proud of is that regardless of whether they are working in freezing cold or moving 400lbs of equipment on location, they always work to my ever demanding high standards. To say they are an asset is an understatement.
In the first photo below, taken with a Polaroid back on a 4×5 view camera, the boys had just secretly “decorated” a light stand with close to 150 stickers they had accumulated from shopping trips to Albertsons. Despite the many cleanings that light stand has undergone, it still sticks when we try to open or close it. The second photo is much more recent!
