Back To Middle School: A Shot At Lacrosse

A friend of mine saw a sports team composite I did a while back for a basketball team and asked if I would create one for her son’s lacrosse team. I’ve been a youth coach for many years and love the process and creativity involved. Naturally, I agreed.

I had a very busy work schedule leading up to the shoot, and I didn’t do a great job of scouting the location or prepping in general. To make it work logistically with a team of 20 kids, we decided to shoot the photos during their 2-hour practice. I had team moms handle all the logistics, since that’s often the hardest part.

I arrived just before practice and found the outside back wall of the gym that was shaded, close to the parking lot, and looked like it would work fine. Since I was going to either cut out or composite the individual players, the backdrop didn’t matter too much. The wall looked grey at first, but on closer inspection, it had quite a bit of blue in it, so I cut off a piece of fashion gray Savage paper and stapled it to the wall (and later taped it using gaffer’s tape) so I had a more neutral color. (A paper stand wouldn’t work here for the reasons below).

A team mom called kids over 3 or 4 kids at a time and I had to shoot quick to get them all done in the 90-minutes or so I had. I had them stand in front of the paper and I shot them waist-up, first standing facing the camera, 1 foot dropped left, 1 foot dropped right, then a full-body shot. I also shot each player wearing their helmet, just so I had some options when it came to building the composite. (I ended up not using any of the helmet shots because you couldn’t see their faces clearly enough. If I had to do this again, I would not take the time to shoot with helmets on).

We had a few challenges: As we began shooting, a gusty wind kicked up and tore the paper off the wall several times, wrinkling it more and more each time until it was heavily wrinkled. I expected the sun to go down behind the building, but it instead came around and shined directly into my shot, which wasn’t ideal. Since I didn’t have times to change locations, I did the best I could at the time.

Here’s a look at one of the later shots in progress and the basic setup:

I did my best to compensate by adjusting flash levels so the areas with direct sunlight didn’t get blown out, and had a friend hold up a Flexfill to flag the sun off the subject’s face. I admit it’s not a very clean setup but I did the best I could without enough prior planning and some unplanned conditions (wind, sun). I was able to shoot each player before the end of practice and at first glance, thought I could work with what I had.

One of my goals in lighting was that I didn’t want flat/even/smooth lighting – I was looking for some drama. I moved the beauty dish to the side to cast a highlight/shadow side to the face, and the intruding sun also ended up adding to this effect.

For the individual photos, I composited a background image over the gray (using overlay/soft light layer blending modes) without having to cut each player out of the background. I built a background that I liked, made some basic level adjustments, and finished the individual shots fairly efficiently.

For the team composite, I cut out the standing players from the background, which wasn’t too difficult since the background was relatively neutral. With a lot players (16 showed up), I chose a wide panorama format – these will be 28″ wide x 12″ tall when printed.

The individual and team composite is below. Please note these are still in progress with some color adjustments still to come.

The gear:
Single Profoto D2 strobe positioned above player looking down and just a bit to the side.
Westcott Joel Grimes 24″ Rapidbox Beauty Dish
Light mounted on C-stand for extra strength & stability
Canon 5D Mark IV. ISO 100, Shutter 200, aperture f7.1-f11
Power supplied from my home-built Batpak
Sandbags, Flexfill, Savage Fashion Gray paper

Here’s the result: