Baseball Portraits
How do you make your 6 Year Old look like a star for his Baseball Portrait? Move beyond basic poses and spend more time in the portrait session than what a photo shoot with hundreds of kids allows.
During Spring break, my Son Aidan and I did some portraits in the setting sun at Midway Park.
Volleyball Action and Portrait Photography Mashup
Among the team and individual photographs I completed last week for Prolink Atlanta Volleyball, I had some time to work with one of the fifteen year-old teams on some higher concept staged action photographs.
The concepts for these are still a work in progress and will be taken further in the future. My goals with the lighting was to help highlight the player as the subject, while reducing the background and improving the stop-action sharpness of the photographs.
Nathan’s Portrait Session
I had these under embargo as it was for a Christmas surprise – but never brought them to the blog! Nathan was a first grade football player for the Lanier Bowl winning Midway Park Wolverines team. Nathan played both ways during the season and some of his action photos also appeared in the blog.
With the weather we had in early December, we scheduled studio time instead of a location session. The portraits were part of a photo book that I put together for Nathan’s Dad as a Christmas surprise.
Off Week Portraits
It’s been an off week for me in terms of shooting assignments. Greater Atlanta Christian is on spring break so no work with Martin Photography. Norcross Soccer Academy is also taking a week off as Gwinnett, and many schools in the Atlanta metro area are on spring break.
So, I find myself looking to expand my abilities with some experimentation at home.
I’m a big fan of environmental (versus studio) portraits. If you look at the way most photojournalists work, they use the subjects environment to give context to them as a person and help bring a story with the photo.
I tried the same approach with Aidan and Evan Monday night.
Lighting is courtesy of a Alien Bee B800 strobe placed camera right, shot through a white umbrella. It was evening, under the twilight providing some of the light and the strobe just helping out some. The swings are in the shade and I also wanted to keep color in the evening sky.
In the case of kids, not confining them to a studio also gave them more freedom to be themselves!
