Lighting The Sports Portrait
This is my favorite style of portrait. You can look on Sportsshooter and find some amazing sports portraiture. Search their message threads for sports portraits and you will find a visual feast. My offering is fairly meager in comparison but I hope you can still take something away from it. I think the sports portrait gives you the most latitude for fun and energy, mainly because most of the people you will photograph are in good shape and are willing to be experimental with you. That can make for some really great pictures.
This first photo is what I call and action portrait. That is just my word for a portrait where the athlete is in motion. These are fun and it helps loosen up the subject because they are actually doing something rather than just “posing.” This young lady was our female soccer athlete of the year so I had a helper toss some soft lobs to her so she could leap into the air for a header. The lighting is a very simple cross light set up. One SB800 is on a light stand to the right and one on a light stand to the left fired with pocket wizards. I set the camera on the ground and tilted it up and just had he do her thing right between the two lights. Exposure would have been about 1/250th at f11.
This portrait is actually of a coach who was leaving his job as head basketball coach at a Christian school to begin a campus ministry to athletes. This has a more complicated lighting set up and uses three Nikon flashes. The first flash I set was clamped to the rim of the basketball hoop using a variable friction arm from Bogen. This strobe was set to use its built in slave. I placed another flash to the camera left to give separation between the subject and background. The main flash is to the camera right as close to the guy as I could get it without it being in the picture and fired through a white umbrella. I climbed a ladder to get him isolated against the basketball court and shot with a 17-35mm lens at the 17 mm setting on a Nikon D2Hs.
Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
I had 2 questions regarding the portrait you made of the coach.
1 – Was there any ambient gym lighting to compete with? (I see reflections on the floor the right/left of the coach, so I’m assuming the lights were on. High School gyms and many others are lit like coat closets anyways.) If so, did yo have to compensate for white balance using any gels or was the off camera flash strong enough to overpower the ambient tones?
I made a photo using a similar technique, except the sun was the backlight and SB-600s were used. (See wedding photos – http://eugenefl.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html)
2 – You mentioned the SB-800 clamped to the rim being triggered by the internal slave. Was this using the Nikon i-TTL CLS system or does the SB-800 have an optical trigger?
Great site. Great photos. You mentioned SportsShooter in your entry. I had to laugh because I’ve been trying to gain membership there for nearly 2 years now without any success. If you know the secret handshake, please let me know. Then again, it wouldn’t be a secret handshake I guess.
Thanks!
Eugenio Cebollero
http://www.eugeniocphoto.com (photo blog)
http://www.photo.net/photos/emc (photo summary)
PS – I am a freelance photographer based out of N. Carolina and shoot locally for the Winston Salem Monthly Magazine. (http://www.winstonsalemmonthly.com)
Eugenio Cebollero
January 3, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Eugenio, first of all, I checked out the link to your wedding portrait and it is beautiful. Now to answer your question. The SB800 has an internal optical slave that can be set up under the flash options panel. In this portrait, I just overpowered the ambient light in the gym. It is pretty dim anyway so there was no problem doing that with three strobes. I did not gel anything but just set up the camera for the strobe setting. Regarding Sportsshooter, I am a member and if you can let me see some work I will sponsor you. It is really pretty simple. From the picture of the bride, it looks to me like you know which end of the camera to point at the subject so you should be good to go. Drop me an email at garycos8@gmail.com.
sixteenfeet
January 3, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Eugenio, scratch that. I just checked out your link and will be happy to sponsor you as a Sportsshooter member. Go ahead and email me and I will give you the secret handshake information because you do need a sponsor code.
sixteenfeet
January 3, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Thank you for your bode of confidence to sponsor me for Sports Shooter. I look forward to upholding their high standards of professionalism, high quality photography, and overall goodwill towards community. I sent a long winded Email which explains how I came across your site and attached examples of recent unpublished work inspired by this article. Thank you for sharing your knowledge of photography on the web and allowing for others to seek inspiration from your work. – Eugenio
Eugenio Cebollero
January 20, 2008 at 8:14 am