As well as travel photography, I like to dip my toe into other areas, either for the money or often just because I am interested in what I am shooting.
And the best part is that with travel photography being such a mixed bag of skills, anything learned while shooting these side projects is usually directly transferable to shooting on the other side of the world.
So, a few months ago, when asked to help shoot one of the many volunteer groups in and around the Cork area for a local exhibition, myself and several other photographers from the Cork Camera Group put our names forward.
Myself I was paired with the Cork Admirals, Cork City’s American Football team playing in the Irish American Football League (IAFL).
Before the shoot, I decided that as well as the head shots and team photos as requested by the team that I wanted to create something a little more cinematic. For inspiration I watched movies about American Football and looked up movie posters. The night before the shoot with a plan in mind, I packed my kit and prayed that Ireland would give me a good old cloudy sky and not crap out and give me one of the very few sunny days we get each year.
(From left; Brian Leonard, Rob Hennessey, Roger MacDonagh)
Thankfully, I got my way and a cloudy but rain free sky was the order of the day. After shooting the simple head and group shots and a few action shots while the team were put through their paces, I grabbed a few of the lads for a quick post training photo-shoot.
After a few hours of running, tackling, and being tackled, you would think the lads would be a little dirtier then they were. Fear not though, the lads were game and allowed me to rub mud into their kit and faces.
The lighting set-up was pretty simple – two bare strobes behind and to either side of the players, and another in a small softbox on a boom slightly in front and above and to the left of Offensive Linesman, Rob Hennessey(at centre).
The mainlight was close enough to give quite a fast falloff, focusing attention on Rob and leaving Brian and Roger dark and brooding in the background. It was also quite small giving a hard-ish light but without hard shadows from the helmet. The two bare strobes were just to give a bit of a rim light to the heads and helmets of the players.
One thing to remember was to get the main light low enough to get some light in and underneath the helmets.
I don’t remember the settings, and they are not really important as they will change from shoot to shoot depending on several factors. The main thing is that I had to under expose the ambient light by a stop or two, to give the sky that really dark brooding feel.
To be honest there wasn’t a huge amount of work done in post. An increase in overall contrast, a boost in local contrast (clarity slider in Lightroom or ACR), sharpening, a slight vignetting to seperate Rob from Brian and Roger in the background, and finally a reduction in overall colour saturation, and a slight boost to the reds.