2010 High School Football Preview Cover
I shot this portrait of Eric and Blake Frohnapfel, players for Colonial Forge High School in Stafford, for our football preview last week. I had to sit on it until in ran in the paper. I managed to avoid shooting the 20 or so portraits of the featured players but I’m sure I’ll be doing our All-Area spread this year.
Winter Sportraits
It’s that time of year again – All-Area sportraits! Every season after herding high school kids cats and hauling a bunch of gear to various high schools around the area I swear I am not doing the next one. Yet somehow the sports editor always makes the assumption I’ll be doing it and somehow it just happens. Anyway, typically the AA shoots involve a mix of studio stuff for the interior team mugs and location shoots for the athletes of the year. I tend to pack a bunch of Nikon strobes and various light modifiers for the location stuff since I have a budget of approximately zero dollars and no assistants aside from other staffers at the paper. Since they are typically pretty busy, I don’t like to bother them. The upside is the athletes usually have a friend or two hanging around and I enlist their service as a voice-activated-lightstand (those familiar with the teachings of St. David of Baltimore know what I’m talking about!) Anyway, here are a few pictures of the set-ups so far. I can’t show you the results till they run in the paper. The set-ups are fairly crude but they get the job done so I suppose that’s all that counts. I’m no McNally fer chrissakes!
I started out using a softbox on the flash but opted for bare bulb to overpower the sun. Gotta love the SB-800′s and the ability to sync at very high shutterspeeds. Like I said, not a pretty set-up but I was pleased with the results. To make things even better, Avery Green, the basketball player pictured, was really excited about the pictures too and was pretty collaborative during the shoot, which always makes things easier. (more…)
Daily Grind – Business Portrait
Mary Petro at Mt. Olympus Berry Farm in Ruther Glen, VA. Petro runs Farm 2 Family Direct, a delivery service for locally-produced food. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)
I shot this last week for the paper’s business section. Every week we have a profile on a local business owner. For a while we got an endless stream of cube dwellers which resulted in an endless stream of man-and-his-computer pictures. Lately there has been an opportunity to meet some interesting people doing interesting things. In my conversation with Mary, she reminded me that there is TON of locally-produced food. Everything from fruits and veggies to meat and dairy products. I think i should make an effort to check that out a little more often…
The tech information: Nikon D300, ISO200, 17mm, f4.5, 1/2000 sec. I used the pop-up flash to trigger a small softbox i was holding off to the left. Gotta love Nikon’s flash systems!
I’ll make an effort to post the tech stuff for the three people out there that care…
