Story behind the photo

Today’s Canada Games athlete portrait is of swimmer Jacqueline Murchison.

I wanted to start off with some portraits outside the pool. Figured it would be easier to shoot them first, that way she wouldn’t get all wet and have to stand around.

Since we were indoors, it was easy to get some slower speeds to try out some more zooming, panning and rotating.

Then I decided to get her in the pool, but still without the cap and goggles.

Tried a few different shutter speeds to see how I could affect the ambient light.
For the shot below, the shutter speed was set to 1/30th, the aperture was at F8. My meter was not zeroed, it was in the minus. That way I knew the only light being exposed was the flash, and some of the reflected light on the water.

To get more of the ambient light in to prevent a darker background, I set a slower shutter speed(1/8th of a second at F8) Now my meter was zeroed, and there is more ambient light in the background. The drawback however is that everything looks a bit green because of the flourescent lights.

Then we got the cap and goggles on.

For the one below, the shutter speed was set to 1/80th of a second

For this one, it was set to 1/20th of a second to let a bit more ambient light in. I prefer the top one better.

No offense to those who swim the breaststroke, but it’s not the most photogenic of the strokes. I tried a few shots, but when the swimmer comes up out of the water, their hands are close together, they are looking down, it just doesn’t work for a portrait.

I really liked the reflections on the water, so I had Jacqueline move down into deeper water so just her head would be above the surface.

I really liked the reflection on the goggles on this shot.

I also tried some shots of her moving through the water, albeit on her back. I really liked the ripples on the surface.

Also tried some close up portraits of her mostly submerged.

I ended the shoots with some shots of her leaping out of the water. Lots of cool splashing, nice smiles, but they maybe look a bit too synchronized swimming and not breaststroke. Not dissing synchro…just saying!

To see more in this series, head to my Canada Games Athlete Galleries on my site that contains more images from this shoot.
To see the full series of posts in the Canada Games Series, click here.
Next up….RUGBY!

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Today’s portrait shoot is of Canada Games rower Keegan Drummond. With my previous water based shoot experience, I realized that I needed MORE POWER if I was going to be able to light up Keegan while he was in the water.

So I velcro-ed together THREE Canon Flashes and fired em up to full power to create enough light.

It was also important to have my assistant Tanner holding the flash stand so that over a thousand dollars of equipment doesn’t go for a fatal swim in the Kennebecasis!

As with previous shoots, I set Keegan up so that he was backlit by the sun. Metered to get the ambient exposure for the bright areas first:

Then turned on the flash monster and let it rip!

Got some nice shots, then I decided to try some on the other side of the dock. From this direction, I was able to get some really great sky and clouds. The sun was shining right on Keegan, but at a higher angle, so it cast ugly shadows. So I used the three flash monster to overpower the sunlight a bit, creating the nice angle of light I was going for:

One of the problems with him in the water was that he kept drifting. Since a rowing scull isn’t the easiest thing to manoeuver, I had him put one of his oars on the dock to keep him steady.

Also tried some shots where I zoomed the lens during the exposure using a slow shutter speed. Worked out quite well!

As he was pulling his scull out of the water, I turned around and realized that would make a cool shot. Keegan was patient enough to hold up his scull for a minute or two so I could bang of a few shots.

The one at the top of this post was my fav from the shoot. It just goes to show how you always want to explore different angles and ideas, even as you are walking away or packing up the gear!

To see more in this series, head to my Canada Games Athlete Galleries on my site that contains more images from this shoot.
To see the full series of posts in the Canada Games Series, click here.

Next up….swimming!

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Today’s portrait is of Canada Games wrestling team member Megan Getchell. This was another indoor portrait, which as previously mentioned, can be beneficial as you have total control over the light.

I started out with some standard portraits. For these shots, I used a single flash in an umbrella, which game me a nice soft light and spread it out to cover the mat. The ambient light was really low(as in most gyms) so I was able to get the background nice and dark very easily by setting the flash to almost full power.

I thought one had a very tough wrestler quality to it with the pose.

Also tried some portraits seated on the mat.

Really like the space on this one.

I wanted to try some shots from a lower angle with Megan in more of a wrestling pose.

She is being lit from below with this small puck size slave flash:

It’s really handy to have in your light kit and has some power. Runs off two AA batteries, and has a built in slave to trigger it. You can buy it here. Only drawback is the optical slave doesn’t work so well outside. For a little bit more, you could buy this version, which has a sync cord attached that you could then hook up to a pocketwizard.

In the image above, I also had a flash behind her shooting up into the ceiling to see what it would look like…didn’t really like it, so I ditched the flash and just went with the from below light, which I liked better with all the ceiling lights becoming spots.

I wanted to try to get more of a natural shot, so I had her teammate come over and pretend to grapple with Megan. I made sure to only get her arms, which provided a great framing element.

I liked the shots lit with the puck, then I also tried some with the flash in the umbrella to the right of the subject and coming down from a 45 degree angle.

Really liked that light, especially with the red reflecting off the mat.

Didn’t have my assistant Tanner with me on the weekend, but the coach of the Rothesay High School wrestling team, Keith Shaw, was happy to stand in for me. Big thanks to him for setting up the mat for us and making arrangements to let us in the school!

To see more in this series, head to my Canada Games Athlete Galleries on my site that contains more images from this shoot.
To see the full series of posts in the Canada Games Series, click here.
Next up….i think rowing…

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Today’s athlete portrait is of volleyball player Chika Ikejiani.

Chika’s a great guy, and I owe him a lot of thanks for his patience and the stupid amount of work it took to get this shot. You will understand why I need to thank him soon…

So it was a pretty simple idea. Get a shot of Chika jumping up at the net and smashing the ball towards the camera. Not too hard, right?

No, it was suprisingly hard… we started with a person who worked at the gym tossing the ball up and having Chika jump up to meet it…

Then I tried tossing it up, figuring that since I was close to the net I could get it right..

but most times ended up with my hand or the ball not in the right spot…I was just as bad with the timing.

Lastly, try with Chika throwing it up to hit it, but again, timing wasn’t right.

So then I tried a different set up, shooting away from the net from a lower position. Flash was high and to the left. Got some neat flaring, but that was kinda it. Low angle made it hard to see his face.

Again, the problem of how to get the ball where I wanted it. I tried throwing it up, but it still wasn’t working.

Then I got an idea… I asked Chika to palm the ball, jump up, and let it go at the top of his jump.

And voila! The shot I wanted with the ball up in the air and Chika about to smash it!
So, back to the net, re-set up the flash to the right, get up on the referee stand, and:

Finally had the shot I wanted! Here are some other variations, all of which have the ball in the right spot!

Also tried some shots where I was set up farther back from the net. Worked okay, but at this point I think Chika was pretty tired.

Considering I had him jump up almost 100 times, I figured I had to give the guy a chance to catch his breath. So I finshed off with a few portraits at the net. Single flash, to the right of him on the other side of the net.

To see more in this series, head to my Canada Games Athlete Galleries on my site that contains more images from this shoot.
To see the full series of posts in the Canada Games Series, click here.
Next up….women’s wrestling!

 

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Today’s shoot is of Canada Games Tennis player Daniel Blake. Another shoot where I had an idea of the shot I wanted…the player leaping through the air, stretched out, smashing the ball…

and well, just couldn’t make it work the way I envision it.
I don’t think Daniel had enough height to jump from to get the right pose I wanted-legs out in a V shape, arms out, smashing the ball with his racket, and looking at the camera. Sometimes the ball wasn’t in the right spot, or his arm wasn’t out enough, he wasn’t far enough off the ladder, or he wasn’t looking at the camera.


Then I started trying some angles with Daniel tossing the ball up for a serve…

Also tried a few with the TUNGSTEN WHITE BALANCE makes everything go blue, then warm up the flash with a CTO FILTER trick.

and realized that if I moved a bit over to my right, and timed it just perfect……
BAM! Ball over the sun. To hell with the leaping in the air shot, this was WAAAAAYYY cooler!
I love the bright halo around the ball, plus the way his arm went dark because the flash angle didn’t cover it.

And amazingly managed to get the ball over the sun again, this time with the TUNGSTEN WB/warming filter!

For some of the shots, the ball wasn’t over the sun, but again I got the cool starburst sunlight.

Thought I’d try some close up portraits framing Daniel with the tennis racket.

First one I had the flash firing directly through the racket, and as you can see, it projected the pattern of the strings onto his face. So then I tried one with Daniel holding the racket out farther from his body, which allowed me to position a flash so it wouldn’t be blocked by the racket.

Also tried some MONSTER lighting(flash below the subject shooting up to give the un-natural shadows.)

Also tried some different variations of framing with the net.






And ended with some shots of him hitting the ball.

To see more in this series, head to my Canada Games Athlete Galleries on my site that contains more images from this shoot.
To see the full series of posts in the Canada Games Series, click here.
Next up….indoor men’s volleyball!

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Today’s Canada Games Athlete is kayaker Sean Wells, who was motivated to make the team to make his late father proud. Since there was a bit more emotion to the story, I wanted to come up with shots that could convey that kind of mood.

Me and my assistant Tanner arrived well before Sean, so I scoped out the location and decided immediately that inside the garage where they stored the kayaks was the spot I needed. It had nice soft natural light coming in, and rows of kayaks.

Here is the natural light, nice and soft, but the exposure was 1/60th of a second at F5.6. Not a lot of depth of field there, kinda borderline handholdable speed.

So I set up a flash coming in directly from the front door, using an umbrella to mimic the soft natural light. Looks the same, but now I get F13 and lots of depth of field.

I did find behind Tanner was a bit dark, so I put another flash and umbrella up to the left to fill in some of the shadows more. I made sure it wouldn’t fall on the left side of the subject and lighten the shadows, I wanted them to stay.

This is an example of why having an assistant is valuable. While you wait for the subject or as they are getting ready, you can set up and test your lighting, time that you don’t have to waste while they are sitting there patiently in front of the camera.

Once Sean was ready, I took a variety of shots, using different angles, compositions, and poses.

We then moved onto the water, but one of the problems was the fact it’s not easy to keep the kayak steady, so we had to do shots with Sean moving through the water. At this point, I was only velcro-ing together two flashes and didn’t have the third, so there wasn’t really enough flash to overpower the sun as much once he got farther away from the dock. The image below is with just the natural sun, which was really at too high an angle to be useful as it creates ugly dark eye shadows. I’m all for good natural light, but if the sun isn’t in the right angle, there is nothing you can do about it, other than block it and use flash to get the light you want.

For the ones below, Sean is mostly backlit by the sun, so the flash can fill him in.

I also tried a few shots by zooming the lens, but again the two flashes weren’t powerful enough to get the light I needed to overpower the sun.

Since they weren’t working out as nice as I hoped, I decided to bring Sean and his kayak up on the dock. The angle was better, as I could set him up backlit by the sun again, with Tanner holding the flashes to the right. Again, it’s exposing for the background at my highest sync speed(1/250th of a second) and then turning the flashes on to fill in the light I needed.

To see more in this series, head to my Canada Games Athlete Galleries on my site that contains more images from this shoot.
To see the full series of posts in the Canada Games Series, click here.
Next up….tennis!

 

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Today’s athlete shoot is of runner Barry Britt. I’ve photographed Barry more than a few times, mainly during actual races, and man, can this guy run. He always seems to be leaps and bounds ahead of his fellow racers coming into the finish line.

This was a case where I had some ideas for photos. The two main ones were him down low at the start blocks using monster lighting against a dark sky, and a shot using slow shutter speeds to create a blur of motion and the flash firing at the end to freeze him, giving the illusion of speed.

The problem with the first idea? Due to the fact he does long distance running, he doesn’t start down low like they do for the sprints. D’oh! To shoot him that way would be misleading, so I got him to get into his normal start pose.
Didn’t have a nice blue sky, but a darker one with clouds, so I set him up against the sky. Exposed for the sky…..

then added the flash to light him up.



Problem with the second idea(blur followed by nice sharp flash image)?
Canon cameras will only fire the flash at the end of the exposure (called REAR or SECOND CURTAIN SYNC) if they are attached to the camera…they won’t even work using another Canon flash in WIRELESS mode!!!!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHH!!!!!!!!!
I HATE CANON!!!!! (Once this series is done, I’m totally going to go off on the Canon Flash system…so stay tuned!)

Even though I had my Pocket Wizard(wireless transmitter) plugged into the external flash sync terminal, it will only send the signal at the start of the exposure.
So…how to create a sense of motion?

Tried shots using slow shutter speeds with flash and during the exposure I tried:

panning the camera:

Zooming the lens out:


Rotating the camera:

But the problem is always the flash fires first, and the blur goes on top, resulting in mostly blurred images!
I got so desperate I even tried getting Barry to run BACKWARDS….which really didn’t look natural at all!

Also tried using slow speeds to pan the camera, and using two flashes. One on a stand that would triggered at the START of the exposure by a Pocket Wizard plugged into the sync terminal, and one that was ON CAMERA set to 2nd Curtain Sync that fired at the end…totally didn’t work either.

Looking back now, the only way I could have done this I think was to use the a Canon flash on-camera set to 2nd Curtain Sync, then have my trusty Nikon SB-800(which I didn’t have with me-message to self, always bring your damn Nikon flash just in case!) set to SLAVE mode to fire when it picks up the Canon flash.

And of course, some more standard portrait shots.

To see more in this series, head to my Canada Games Athlete Galleries on my site that contains more images from this shoot.
To see the full series of posts in the Canada Games Series, click here.

Next up….kayaking

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Today’s portraits are of divers Christian Zehmer and Kirsten MacDonald, taken at the Canada Games Aquatic Centre in Saint John. Again, a two person shoot made me have to think about to come up with some good compositions. I started off with each of them standing on a diving board.

I used a flash for each diver to light them up, which were positioned to my left for Kirsten and to my right for Christian, and angled 45 degrees. The first image was taken with the ambient light in the pool underexposed to create a darker background(1/60th of a second at F9)

The image below was taken with a wider aperture to bring out more of the background(1/60th of a second at F5.6). It was also taken on the middle height diving boards, which I thought would give a more interesting angle.

I liked the two on the board, but as always, trying different angles, I moved over for more of a vertical shot with them on the lower boards again. Since the divers were no longer parallel to the camera, I had to get more depth of field, so I closed the aperture to F16. If I wanted to balance the ambient light, I would have had to use a really slow shutter speed. But for this shot, I wanted the background to go darker anyway, so I left the shutter speed at 1/60th of a second.

I wanted to get them a bit closer in size in the frame, so I switched to my 70-200mm lens, which I hadn’t used at all for most of these shoots. By zooming in, it compressed the space and made them appear closer together.

Tried a few different poses, but I really liked them standing better.

Then I decided to try them on one board together. The first shots I took were from the higher platform looking down on them.

Then I got lower and tried various compositions and angles. I also framed them with the diving board rails, which I liked.

Also tried some zooming/panning shots with a slow shutter speed.

My fav was this shot

To see more in this series, head to my Canada Games Athlete Galleries on my site that contains more images from this shoot.
To see the full series of posts in the Canada Games Series, click here.

Next up….running!

 

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Today’s athlete is cyclist Justin Theriault, who I photographed outside the Telegraph-Journal office in Saint John.

The upper parking lot provided a nice high spot that allowed me to get lower than Justin so I could put some of the nice clouds behind him on his bike. So like many of the previous images I’ve done for the shoots, I first balanced the ambient light behind the subject(250th of a second at F14). This left him as a silhouette almost, allowing me to add the light I wanted to him.

Using two flashes, I added the light from a 45 degree angle to the left of Justin, and adjusted the power levels until the light was right.

Like all the shoots, I’ve tried a few different poses and set-ups.

Another slow shutter speed plus zooming shot here that I really liked.

I tried a final set up with a bit harsher light created by manually zooming the flashes in to create a more narrow beam. I also underexposed the background by setting a higher shutter speed. It was neat, but my fav was still the zoom one above!

Notice something funny about the shot below?

Only one flash fired. There have been lots of reports of problems with newer Pocket Wizards and Canon Flashes due to RF noise from the flashes interfering with the signals. Due to the short cords, the Pocket Wizards had to be close to the flashes, and this RF noise may be the reason why the other flash didn’t fire…or the Pocket Wizards could have been too close as well, I’m not sure.
I bought an headphone extension cord that allowed me to move them farther down the stand and haven’t had a problem since.

To see more in this series, head to my Canada Games Athlete Galleries on my site that contains more images from this shoot.
To see the full series of posts in the Canada Games Series, click here.

 

Next up….DIVING!

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This was the second shoot done for this series, this time it is soccer players Cassian Ferlatte and Marisa Duguay.
As previously mentioned, the first day of shooting was an overcast day. Which is good in that the light is lower and makes for better flash control, but the skies tend to be gray and boring. When I started this whole series, I took the time to find out who I was shooting and tried to come up with ideas beforehand.

For the soccer shoot, I envisioned a player leaping into the air to do a flying kick lit up by cool flash, kind of in the vein of this, done by one of my former students Georges Long, an amazing photographer who after the second class I think I asked him why he was taking the class! But it turned out there would be two players for the shot and I didn’t think I could get the co-ordination required for that kind of shot with the two of them.

I did try some shots of them shooting the ball towards the camera, but since they were focusing on striking the ball, their faces weren’t as visible. Also there was the potential damage to myself or the camera if they didn’t kick the ball high enough, so I moved on to a different set up.

Tried some shots of them in front of the goal, lit up by a flash on either side, which created some interesting cross lighting.

Editors always like choice, so I always try to shoot horizontals and verticals.

Just to mix it up a bit, I tried switching the WHITE BALANCE on the camera to OVERCAST(or cloud on some cameras) which warmed up the tones.

The shots that I really liked however were with them framed by the goal net. I set them up on the other side and went behind the net to frame them.

To play with the color a bit, I also shot with the camera WHITE BALANCE on TUNGSTEN(or INCANDESCENT), which turned everything blue, and putting a CTO warming gel on the flash to warm up the flash.

For the next few shots, I used a flash placed on their side of the net to light them, and lit up my side of the net with another flash. That flash was placed high in the air and tilted down at a sharp angle so it would only light up the net and not the players.

I also played around with the ambient exposure by setting higher shutter speeds, which makes the natural light go darker, as seen below:

I also tried some “monster lighting” on their side, but I didn’t like it as much.

To see more in this series, head to my Canada Games Athlete Galleries on my site that contains more images from this shoot.
To see the full series of posts in the Canada Games Series, click here.

Next up….cycling!

 

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