Few days break from Blog writing - and now back with few images from earlier this year.

Finding time to experiment/try new things with portraits/sportraits and athletes can be difficult, especially if you are wanting to try something new. You would need to agree the time with the athlete, so you could have the time to adjust the lights to get the results you really want. So, what do you do when you have about 15 seconds per player, to get some low-light portrait / sportrait images of basketball players that are ready to get on the court to do their warm-up.

First of all, you ask for a friendly photographer (in this case the talented Mr Mansoor!) to pose for few moments to get the lighting sort of right - although with the players being different heights, etc. You might not get the light exactly where you would have liked it, note to self - get the friend stand on something to make them taller :-)

These images were taken backstage at the BBL Cup Final in Birmingham's National Indoor Arena, where there was luckily a black curtain that was ideal for the backdrop of the images. As what I was after was players on a totally dark background, with strong shadows. Few different settings were used for the pictures, I had two lights (one left or the subject, one right) as well as a flash on top of the camera on a low setting just to light up a bit of the nose area. I kept switching between two lights + flash and one light + flash.

SETTING UP IMAGE WITH MANSOOR

England-09 With the players, I tried to mix&match it a little, shoot from the left and have the light coming from the front/back, shoot from the right and have the light coming from left/right, shoot straight on with light from various directions. Some of the lighting worked OK, others were straight into the 'delete' folder. In some images, the shadows are a tad bit too harsh, or maybe that could be a matter of taste?

But taking images at these types of situations is not allowing you as much creativity as you have in a studio setting - with the time being very limited, you do not have time to adjust this light a notch up/down, move the lights - you need to work fast and efficient and hopefully display something that the clients next time deem worth spending more time on.

SAMPLE IMAGE OF A PLAYER SHOOT with ORLAN JACKMAN- more in the Slide Show!!

England-05

A big thanks for all the players who were 'game' for this quick snapping of pictures, including Tayo Ogendengbe, Orlan Jackman, Mike Tuck, Adrien Sturt, David "TinTin' Watts... You should have received your own copies of the images, if you have asked for them.

As always, photographing is a constant learning curve - every day you see something that you don't know and want to learn to do, only your imagination really is the limit in what you can do (well - that and some good taste and keeping things with-in the law ;-) ). In the coming months, there should be more experiments, with different athletes in different situations/lighting for portraits. So hopefully you'll keep on coming back to have a look at those Blog entries as well

Possibly the favourite image of mine is the ones with Orlan Jackman - he seemed to have a natural willingness and skill to pose for the images and even had in mind the way he was going to pose. As my instructions to the players were 'act as you want - be creative - impulsive'. But the stare from behind the ball, yes it has been done millions of times before by others - but it does not always mean that it can't work one more time :-) There is also a B&W version of the 'stare' - and with the shadows, etc, it really gives a nice contrast and feel to the image.

It's nice sometimes to get away from 'just' shooting the game, keeps your mind fresh and gives you new perspectives to your work. More of these to come in the weeks ahead - and always happy to hear from players who would like something 'different' photographed for their own portfolios.