Basketball portraits

Sometimes I am really glad I got smart and spent my money on a lighting kit. Certain assignments really turn out nicer and show my professionalism when I take pictures with good lighting instead of the weak on-camera-flash that reporters do when they're assigned to take pictures.

I have nothing against reports doing photography, in fact I feel that they should learn it in depth to further their skills as journalists. However, most do not know much about making pictures and their newspapers suffer from it. The Trib (my internship) is one of these newspapers suffering from bad photo work.

I shot headshots of high school basketball players the other day to be used in upcoming stories about games and what athletes contributed. The standard head and shoulders style picture. However, I didn't want to make these images look weak since I'm a photographer by trade and expect quality of myself in every thing I shoot.

The picture above is shot with a single flash, Vivitar 285HV, on top of my camera facing the team. Nothing special, I was far away enough that the flash diffused on it's own and didn't make for an ugly back shadow. The picture to the left is a bit more complex. Shoot through umbrella on the left, and a bare flash on the right for fill. Most of my light was coming from the left. I did cross lighting to keep from creating any shadows on the background (bleachers). This was the only note that the paper gave me about my photo, keep shadows off the background. Easy enough. Shooting with a long lens (I shot at around 80 to 100mm) and with a really wide aperture (f2.8) gave me a shallow depth of field (made the background blurry). The second flash makes sure that the subject isn't getting attached to the background with any really dark areas.

Best thing about this shoot was that the players were really cooperative. They got into place fast, stood there still, didn't goof off, and things moved quickly. The group shot was so easy. The photographer for the school had to do a group shot so he did all the posing for me. I just sat back and waited, told the team to wait before moving, then took my photo from the same spot. Easy!