Thursday, 11 March 2010

Studio Shoot - Referee Poses

Location
Studio at Burton College, Second Floor of The New Learning Centre

Equipment
Canon 5D Camera
Canon Zoom Lens EF 24-105mm
Bowens Pulsar Remote Trigger and Receiver
Bowens Esprit 500 Studio Flash x 3 with soft boxes
Bowens Esprit 1000 with open dish reflector
Sony Alpha 200 Camera
Studio Florescent Lights
White Background
Lighting Set Up
Please see the separate blog on the lighting set up used on this shoot

Comments




These are some of the images from Robert Seale's website that inspired the ideas for the shoot I completed this evening. The main things I like about Robert's photos is their simplicity. There is no gimmicks or fancy backgrounds, he has just used lighting and focus to illustrate the athletes in creative ways. I feel it is in the simplicity of his shots that make they so effective. I like the way the HIGH KEY shots show the athlete only without any distracting backgrounds. I have guessed what kind of lighting he has used to show the key areas of the athlete and will try and duplicate this style of photography.
After trawling the Internet I wasn't able to find any good photo shots of English referees so I decided that I would call in my friend who is a professional referee to try and take a series of shots that show the well known poses that referees and assistant referees use during a game. I was going to use HIGH KEY method of lighting to make the referee stand out from the background.
The shoot didn't start well because after checking my kit during the day I had forgotten to repack my hot shoe converter that allows my Sony unique hot shoe a standard one. This simple mistake meant that I had to use the college camera, a Canon 5D, instead of my Sony Alpha 200. This may not sound too bad as I was using a better camera than my own but I know all, well most of the short cuts and ins and outs of my Sony whereas I only know how to do the very basics with the 5D. I know enough to complete the shoot. The big lesson I will take away from the beginning of this session is that to check and check again my kit (perhaps designing a photo shoot check list is the way to go).
After playing around with the power settings of the flashes I found the balance I was looking for and starting my shoot. My model was really patient with me which helped as I was trying to get to grips with a strange camera and we were able to try a wide range of poses. As this was my first studio shoot I decided to try shooting from different angles and heights to see what results I could come up with. I also decided to vary the depth of field so that key parts of the model were in focus whilst blurring the rest. I thought the best options for this would be the end of the flags, the red and yellow cards as he was holding them out to an imaginary player.
At the end of the shoot I wasn't happy with the depth of field some of the shots were giving me due to the aperture on the lens so I turned on the studio lights and took some shots with the Sony Alpha 200 with my 50mm portrait lens and dropped the aperture down to 1.8 so that only the points nearest the camera were in focus.
Overall, I feel that the shoot went really well and hopefully the end results will reflect this. I think I learnt a lot during this shoot and I am looking forward to improving my use of lighting in my next one.
To view the shots taken with the Canon please click HERE or to see the shots taken with the Sony please click HERE.

1 comment:

  1. Hi
    This use of the studio for a shoot will meet a variety of criteria, 1.1,1.3,1.4,1.6,1.7,1.8,2.1,2.2,2.4,2.5, and your self evaluations will meet 2.6.
    A good body of written work with supporting photography/galleries.
    Meets all the criteria as labelled

    steve

    ReplyDelete