A project that had been kicking around in my head for quite a while had been to shoot a basketball player in their natural environment. As I play basketball (sometimes not very well!) each week with a bunch of talented guys I had a good pool to choose from.

I asked my friend in the team John if he would be willing to pose for me. Once I explained the idea he was really willing to help out.

I now needed to get use of the stadium as they are a busy centre that always has something on. A phone call, email and another phone call later and the deal was done mind you a nice early 7.30am start!

I give John top cred – he came into this with as much enthusiasm as I did which was good, gave the whole shoot a great vibe from the word go. He had about 10 changes of clothes which was great as I had only had one in mind but ended up using a few.

Set up for images was a mixture of varying Nikon SB units. The beauty of the speedlights is that it gives you the ability to change up the scene quickly without having to move a ton of gear around. The above shot was an SB800 fired through a shoot through umbrella camera left with an SB600 camera right firing at the back of John’s head through another shoot through. I also had an SB28 bare on a stand down the back pointing at the backboard to light it up. All units fired by Pocket Wizards.

Was great to shoot John. Here’s hoping I can come up with another shoot to use him in. Maybe even an outdoor setting this time!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 12:45 PM and is filed under Portraits, Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.