The NCAA tournament is here, so what better way to start this week's blog by a basketball photoshoot of my friend Paolo and my son Kris. Both Pao and Kris have mad basketball skills so I think they are both perfect for this photo shoot.In this shoot, Dominic ... my good friend and fellow photo enthusiast accompanied me and he also provided the venue for our shoot. His basement was a good spot to do our shoot because there is so much room to move and play around.
We want our shoot to not only be basketball portraits, we want to capture a lot of movement and running around which is how basketball is. So on our first shoot, we asked our models to sprint-dribble across the basement. We placed 2 snooted Vivitar 285HV speedlights(both are at 1/4 power) on each end of the floor where they are running and created a cross light on the path where they are running. Though we can pretty much kill the ambiant by the shutter speed, we place a black backdrop to help in the separation.
And here are some of the results:
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This created a really nice natural action shot of Paolo and Kris while running and dribbling. The pictures turned out just like those Nike posters(well, thats what we are really aiming for,lol).
The next sequence of shot is shooting them facing front while doing some fancy dribbling skills. We used the same cross-ligthing setup used in the first sequence.
Here are the behind the scenes:
Here are some of the results:
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Then we added a 3rd light source on the portrait shots, a Nikon SB26 (1/8 power) on a shoot thru umbrella, just above the subject to add more drama on the picture. We do not have a boom to hold the flash and the camera so we improvised by having me stand up on a chair and hold the stand above the subjects.
See how we did it :
And see the results:
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We also created a Nike-like poster by stitching a couple of pictures together. This created some transition of one photo to another to create motion.
Click Image to see it in large
Again, you do not need expensive equipments to create cool pictures just how you see it on billboards and magazines. In this series we only used 3 cheap speedlights and we have created pictures worthy of being put in an ESPN magazine (I think??? lol). Lighting photography is really fun and not that hard, you just have to do a lot of creative thinking and enjoy what you are doing.
Here is a slideshow of all the pictures taken in this series:
Models: Paolo Velarde and Kris Rivera
Photographer: Dominic Estrella
Lighting Director : Randall Rivera
Gears: Canon EOS 5D, 24-70mm L, Cactus Ebay Triggers, Vivitar 285HV(2), Nikon Sb26