Last year one of the projects I was asked to undertake for Leeds Metropolitan University was to photograph some of their talented sports students. There was no specific brief, they left it open for me, all they wanted were some great stand alone portraits. Very exciting as I had never had such an open brief before but also terrifying!
I started off the project photographing Carla Cantrell a very talented footballer who plays for Leeds Carnegie and England. It was a fairly typical summers day, no sun just loads of threatening dark heavy clouds. I had just picked up my new Ranger Quadra pack from the Flash Centre in Leeds and was really looking forward to trying them out!
Also on the shoot was my assistant Linda whom you can see in the image above, it was a little windy so she had to hang on to some of the lights! We were going to have about 45 minutes with Carla so we got to our location early to get set up and do a few tests. I was hoping that as well as getting some nice moody portraits we would also persuade her to leap in the air for some action shots - result below. She kindly obliged, I won't tell you how many times it took to get the perfect shot, too many to mention!
This shot was taken using a Canon EOS 5D with a 16-35mm 2.8 lens, using 2 x Quadra lights one placed on the left of the subject and the other over to the far right as a fill in. The Quadras were great, really portable and very light, so light that you need to anchor them down as they sometimes easily fall over. The above finished image was darkened down in photoshop using layers to get make the shot moodier. The project took 2 months to complete with 15 finished images some of which are shown below:
Well, that was one of last year's projects, here's hoping that this years will be as exciting and challenging!!!
