Sports Portrait session with one of my favorite players, Noah Davis.
I’ve had the privilege of shoot him in action since he was 7. All of a sudden…BAM! He’s going to be a Senior this upcoming school year!
This was a quick session, sorta….You try to be prepared for almost anything for a shoot, but no matter what there’s always 1 hiccup. This was one, keys…No one had keys to the gym… Not gonna say who’s at fault.. (Cough, Cough..April) but just like Wonder Woman she pulled through and saved the day. We got started about 7ish and ended by 830ish.
Concept here was some basic shots of Noah, doing what he loves…Basketball. (he may have others, but that night we were concentrating on this)
Couldn’t ask for a better place, brand new gym floor! Just us and no distractions!
We kept the gym lights off and used the natural ambient light of the gym through the windows and 3 Lights.
All shot with a Canon 1DXMKII and Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM @ f/2.8 – f/4, 1) AD200 with a Parapop 38 , 2) 600EX-RT with 24×36 Softboxes.Most of these were shot using a 3 Light setup, using an XPro trigger to fire the AD200 and using the speedlights in Optical slave mode. The problem with this was shooting faster than 1/250th for the action part. You cannot shoot HSS in optical slave and my new receivers had not gotten here yet (Day Late)…so him shooting was shot with 1 Light.
I chose this setup rather than my traditional strobe set, because of portability, no wires and much less crap to carry around.
IMAGE HIGHLIGHT
PROFILE
I wanted to capture an image of him that represented his passion for the game, that could also be used as a profile pic.
Something that was up close and personal, tight shot on the face but somehow have the basketball in it. The look on his face shows his focus on the game and represent his strength.
This was lit using Main Light camera left and 1) speed light on the other side of his arm at a lower power to add some fill lighting on the face. I feel we pulled it off, but this was a difficult pose to get right. To get exact profile shot (only 1 eye) to get bright enough, keep ball in place, get the arm at proper angle and to get the right look, was a challenge. He pulled off like a pro though!
SOMETHING DIFFERENT
With the newly painted floor, I wanted to capture an image with the Tiger at half court. I tried using a ladder but it wasn’t tall enough to give me the perspective I wanted. So, I do what I always do, Lay Down and shoot low to gain a different angle. When I did his reflection was SO COOL, I had to capture this image!! Cropped to a 16×9 Format so it could be used for a FB Cover and Computer Wallpaper.
By this time almost all ambient light was gone, so we wrapped up and packed up!
Editing
Very little editing was done in these images. Most of all of it was done in LR and blemish control was done in PS.
In LR, I used graduated filters to darken areas of the photo to reduce the spill from my speed lights. Maybe a touch of Clarity and Highlight Sliders.
Even though I felt like I had enough light on these, I still had to add a tad bit of Noise Reduction to the entire image.