'He's on fire' - Looking at a basketball project

The above image is from last year's basketball poster at Faulkner University. There were five seniors last year, all of whom were to be featured on the poster. I really wanted to try something new, so I talked with the guys about doing a fire theme. Faulkner's colors are royal blue, black, gray and white and I thought it would be cool if we went with, well, a "cool" blue theme. This was the most challenging undertaking I had last year, but it was worth the effort. Here is a bit about how I went about it.

The first thing I needed to do was shoot the athletes. The above image is of then-senior guard Richarde McCray out of Marietta, Georgia. I shot each guy doing a different move - I had Rich doing a layup.

The lighting setup is shown below and is VERY simple. I bounced an SB-800 into a silver Westcott umbrella to give harder light and moved it back a bit in order to 1.) cover him completely, 2.) to ensure that it would cover him in the zone of approach. I didn't pose them in action situations, I actually made them do the full motion so it would look natural - or as natural as possible with a guy holding a flaming ball. I gave Rich a jump marker and then tacked him with the continuous servo mode on my D200. I shot about 10-15 frames and liked this one the best.

The image below is the unprocessed RAW right out of camera (cropped to 5x6 for posting here). The main light was a diffused SB-28 shot through a translucent Westcott umbrella. This light illuminates Rich with a soft glow that gives just enough light, while the stronger rear light provides good contrast as a rim light. I shot this from a low angle to add to the drama of the image. The diffused light is shot from about my height (kneeling) and aimed upward.

I shot it at f/4 and 1/200th of a second at ISO 200. The lighting was enough to overpower the majority of the gym lights as is evident in the fixtures behind Rich.

I imported the RAW image into Aperture adding a bunch of alignment adjustments and then exported the JPEG into Photoshop. The first thing to do was remove the background completely, then to ad various effects for the final image. All of the steps were not recorded (again, then I was not planning on doing a blog :), but the general ideas are as follows.

A new layer for the ball was added and I changed it to a soft blue. I then added the 'Wind' filter and manipulated the flames with the blur tool. After achieving a hot rod effect I used the transform tool to give the flame a path that paralleled the action. I then placed a duplicate ball layer over the flame layer and added some glow to it.

I added blue filters to Rich and adjusted the saturation as needed. I dodged and burned as well to try and simulate the reflections in relation to the light source, in this case the ball. There are certainly places that catch some blue light that likely would not have, but the poster was already black and I needed as much of the athletes visible as possible.

There was a lot of trial and error on the flames and a lot of starting over. I am by no means a Photoshop wizard, but I thought it came out pretty good. I will likely try to build on this idea again in the future, but for now, I'm experimenting elsewhere. Sorry there were not more details in this post, but I hope you found it interesting and that maybe it sparked your imagination.

Until next time, be safe and happy shooting.

- R

Shooting the Coca-Cola ads for the yearbooks

As a followup to the football cover I discussed last time, I decided to introduce a few other lighting setups that are very similar in nature. Every year we run a Coca-Cola ad in the back inside cover of every yearbook. I asked Coca-Cola - the athletic department's biggest corporate sponsor - if we could use their Powerade logo for these ads. The logo is featured throughout our signage around campus and is a Coke trademark. I thought it would definitely match the theme better and the Coke logo is already featured on our inner cover as well. They declined. So the soda beverage is still used here in conjunction with these images of athletes in action- oh, well.

In years past, the designers simply used an action shot from the season for this page, but as usual, I wanted to take it a step further. Last year I started selecting a single player that would be used for the advertisement. This year, I wanted to do a mock action shot with the same gritty look that I had used on the football cover. I decided to use this look on the covers and on the Coke ads to give it a bit of an edge and to keep the books somewhat unified in design.

I've included two different shots here just for fun. The image above is for the men's soccer book and features senior goalkeeper Jeffery Preston. As with the football cover and the women's ad to follow, the subject and background were shot separately. Jeff was shot in the corner of the gym on campus. Because it was exam week and I had other deadlines that I was trying to meet, we needed the shoot to be fast and simple.

I set up a folding mat on the floor for cushioning just in case he lost his balance. For this shot I really wanted the subject to be foreshortened with the action coming toward the viewer. To accomplish this, I had him part his feet and then, on his tip-toes, lean out toward the camera. Think of a wide receiver trying to keep his feet in bounds while leaning out over the sidelines to make the catch. The shot's wide angle helps accentuate the effect. By shooting at 24mm on a full frame camera, but moving in close, the effect is a bit more pronounced. Of course shooting with a fish-eye lens would have made it even more pronounced, but I didn't really want to take it that far. An aperture of f/8 still left some depth to the image as well. I am shooting with a D700 at 1/2ooth of a second and I am doing so on a short ladder to give myself some elevation.

As you can see from the diagram below, the setup is really simple and portable. I lit Jeff with three strobes, all portable Nikon speedlights (forgive the illustrations - I did not have time to redesign the flash heads today :). The front light was actually more of a fill light. As with the football shoot, the strongest light is coming from behind and to the sides of the subject to give a harder look, creating more contrast. The fill light is an SB-800 shot through a Westcott translucent umbrella. The light that is doing most of the work here is actually behind Jeff. I set an SB-25 in a silver Westcott umbrella and let it illuminate him along the entire back side and spilling to the front. The final light is working to fill the back of the subject. This is another silver Westcott umbrella with an SB-28 aimed inside. The power levels were not recorded. I will try to log this information in the future.

The image below is the RAW image as shot in camera. Because these shots were literally setup, clicked and taken down in under 10 minutes, I did not fiddle with setting up a backdrop, though the brick wall did help out a bit. I backed the ladder up a tad for this image which was, I believe, the second or third to last taken. The foreshortening effect was working against me as the subject was just in the limits of the minimum focusing distance on the 24-70mm f/2.8 and we were having a hard time getting the whole body in frame as needed - his face and hands kept blocking out his legs and feet.

The final image is a composite just like the football cover (see previous post). The field was shot on an overcast day at an elevated height as well to match the scene. The images were treated with sharpening, contrast and saturation adjustments and more to taste.

The women's ad below was designed in the exact same way. The only difference was this was shot in the studio upstairs and I used two strobes in softboxes instead of umbrellas.

As you can see there is nothing fancy about the setup. I used a large softbox with the internal baffle only, and positioned it horizontally to fill the entire front of senior Leslie Hudgens. I feathered the light downward a bit as well. The back light is in a small softbox and is feathering her along the back. Both were Alien Bees 800s. This was shot with a D300 set at f/8 and 1/250th of a second.

The ball was photographed separately and the speed lines were added in Photoshop. Here's something you might have noticed - the same ball and blur is used in both images. Why reinvent the wheel?

Below is the RAW image as shot in camera. As you can see, I didn't even take the time to set up a seamless. Again, these were setup, shot and packed up very quickly. If I had more time and fewer projects, I would definitely love to try out some other ideas, but for now, this will work.

I hope you found this helpful. I have posted an image for tomorrow's (hopefully) post for you to look at. That one is more about Photoshop and careful planning. The shooting was the easy part really. As we progress I promise to explore different images and genres. Right now, these are the ones that people have asked about, so I'm starting there.

Until next time, be safe and happy shooting.

Making the 2008 Football Yearbook Cover

In my two years with the university, perhaps no other project has gained as much notoriety or sparked more questions than the cover of this year's Football Yearbook. Formerly referred to as media guides, the yearbooks created for each sport offer vital information about the program to potential recruits, media outlets, fans, corporate sponsors and various organizations. The books contain team and player statistics, program history, upcoming schedules and events, action shots and much more. Because we are a small school, the athletic department has always tried to ensure that the covers of these books deliver an impact. When your school's book is tossed among hundreds of others, what makes it stand out? Will it draw someone's attention?

This year I decided on more of a three dimensional concept. Typically, cover art can be flat with only a few drop shadows or various-sized text offering all sorts of layering or perspective. I was guilty of this last year. Though the book was received with much praise, it was our inaugural season and anything remotely interesting would fly. This year we'd be entering conference play for the first time and would likely be drawing more fans and media attention, and I wanted something that "popped".

I knew I wanted to focus on an odd number of players to give some symmetry to the overall image. I also knew I wanted to incorporate a stadium and I wanted it to be somewhat dark and moody, yet have highlights and contrast. The first step was narrowing down the more than 120 athletes to just three. I collaborated with the head coach on who we should feature as the cover boys for the program. There were several candidates, but we decided on sophomore quarterback Philip Moore (center), junior middle linebacker Sean Thom (left) and junior defensive end Jason Evans (right). Because we had so many other standout players on the team, we decided to feature them on other pages in the book, including the Coke advertisement that we run on the back inside cover of every book. More on this project in an upcoming post.

As you undoubtedly already know the final image is a composite of countless images and Photoshop layers. Each player was shot individually and then added to the frame and the background was a composite from a few stadium images and some Photoshop work. I will begin by discussing the lighting setup used for the player images.

The diagram below shows the basic lighting setup for Moore, the center athlete. The overall lighting concept was very similar for all three athletes, with most of the differences coming in the form of rim lighting. When I was photographing the players, I knew what I wanted the final image to look like, but I had yet to gain access to the stadium so I was not sure how the background would look exactly or what would actually be visible given the limited scope - we wanted the players to be the dominant subject. I lit the athletes the way I hoped would work and crossed my fingers on the background at least somewhat matching my idea. [Please forgive the misspelling of "subject" in the diagrams]

As you can see the lighting setup is nothing revolutionary, but it was extremely effective here. Moore is lit using three lights. The fill light, which is actually in front do to the dominant contrast light to the side, is an Alien Bees 800 in a large foldable softbox with a grid attached to the front to help control focus and spill. It's positioned about 45 degrees or so to camera left. The harder side light, really the main light here, is coming from another AB800 reflected into a silver Westcott umbrella directly on his left side (90 degrees camera right). Because I knew that he'd be flanked by two players which would actually end up behind him, I took caution not to give him too much rim light from any dominant side. So, I went with another AB800 with a 30 degree honeycomb grid about 8 feet back and focused it like a hair light with weight going slightly to his left (camera right). I used flags to control spill from the rim and side lights. I shot this project on a Nikon D300 with a 17-55mm f/2.8 lens. The power settings from the strobes were not recorded (I will make better attempts to do this in the future), but camera settings were 1/200th at f/8 in RAW mode. White balance was set with an Expo Disc, but would fall in the 5000-5600 range for these strobes.

I photographed the subjects from a lower angle to create a somewhat more menacing and dominating perspective. Posing was rather simple. I had Moore hold a ball out in front and at a lower positions and just slightly to the left (camera right) to keep the pose from becoming too symmetrical. The defensive players offered slightly more aggressive facial expressions and the folded arms further heightened the impact of the portrait. The subjects were sprayed with a water bottle to mimic sweat and lightly padded down with a towel to keep it from looking like they just came out of the shower.

For the other players, the same lighting setup was used for both, but flipped 180 degrees to highlight the different sides of the composition. The diagram below is the layout used for Thom (cover left). I wanted a stronger rim light on both him and Evans, so I moved the AB800 with silver umbrella back approximately 45 degrees to his right (camera left) to create a harder, fuller rim light. I then moved it around a bit more because I had him facing further to my left and then attached a small foldable softbox to the other AB800 with only an inner baffle attached, giving me a slightly more contrast-y light to his left (camera right) to help highlight his shoulder pads. This light was turned down to keep it from being too overwhelming and I raised it so it to about seven feet and aimed it downward.

The rim light really makes for great separation here and it provides even more contrast to the final product. The small softbox, with inner baffle only, provides nice highlights in the triceps and forearms which helps define the muscle tone and provides more contrast.

The guys were then cut out from the black background in Photoshop and were enhanced for a gritty look. Through layers and adjustment masks I increased contrast and sharpening, removed undesirable color casts, changed color saturation and applied a bit of dodging and burning where needed. I also removed any water beads that seemed out of place or too excessive. They were then transferred to the cover template where I added a slight shadow behind Moore to give a bit of separation and then used a gradient mask to blend the legs into the dark turf.

The background was shot at about 3 p.m. in full sun. I removed undesirable artifacts from the stadium like trash cans, a player's helmet, a bench and a radio tower. Because I was dealing with an 8.5x11 inch cover, I had to cut two pieces of the stadium and merge them so that two sets of lights would have room on the cover. Blending the bleachers in Photoshop was a pain and luckily the players cover most of the overlap. The lights were obviously not lit when I photographed them, so I used various brushes in Photoshop to create the almost movieposter-like lighting effects. I generally used star effect brushes and even some comets to create the corner light flares. The background was also heavily treated with contrast adjustments and was then given contrast, sharpening and saturation treatments like the players. The sky was a gradient mask that I created in Photoshop as well. The final touches were back gradient mask at the bottom of the page and then text was added to complete the cover.

It took a lot of time, luck and trial and error to get the final product, but it was well worth the effort.

Thanks,

- R