Baseball Player – Alex Nevue
When we arrived at the field the skies were hazy overcast. Not good at all for making portraits that include the sky. However, this is springtime in the pacific northwest and in the evening when the temperature drops, the clouds come out to play. Within 30 minutes the haze changed to full blown clouds. For Alex, I wanted to capture the unique way he holds the ball before going into his windup.
For this shoot I used only speedlights. 2 Nikon SB800s and one LumoPro LP 1600 (which I was trying out for the first time). Because of how dark it was getting, I was able to use the speedlights at 1/2 and 1/4 power. Camera/lens: Nikon D7000 and Nikon 12-24/f4.0. Also Pocket Wizard Plus II units and Quantum Battery packs.
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Sports photography, sports portraits and sportraits in Vancouver, WA and Portland, OR.
Baseball Player – Kody Watts
Kody Watts just completed his senior year baseball season at Skyview High School in Vancouver, WA. He is an amazing pitcher who routinely throws at over 90 MPH (96 MPH tops so far)!! Every time I cover one of his games I thoroughly enjoy every pitch. Below is a sports portrait I shot of him. I wanted to capture the look on his face when he is getting signs from his catcher. I’ve worked with Kody before. He’s a great guy to work with and I know that he is going to make it easy for photographers that shoot him in the big leagues! Many thanks Kody!
The portrait below was shot using 3 lights. The sun was the 1st (behind Kody, camera left). The 2nd was an 800 WS strobe (behind Kody, camera right). The 3rd was and 800 WS strobe above me and slightly to camera right.
About 2 dozen pro scouts turned out for Kody’s final high school game.
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Sports photography, sports portraits and sportraits in Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA.
March 2010 Mailer
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.
More Skyview Sports Portraits
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.
Skyview Profiles (01)
This football season we were fortunate to be able to work with a dozen Skyview High School athletes creating profile portraits (sportraits) for my Storm website. We worked over a two day period shooting at Kiggins Bowl, Skyview’s home stadium. Jordan, my photo assistant (and son), really got a workout as we took 400 lbs of studio equipment on location and had to move it all over the stadium. Congratulations to the Skyview football team for making it all the way to the WIAA 4A Semi-Finals!
Below is the first set of portraits. I’ll present more in a future post.
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