First Studio Portraits :)

Hi again! Twice in one week, that's definitely a change. So I have (almost) officially started my project for this semester. My idea is to take sports portraits, mostly of athletes at Clark, in the studio or hopefully on the court/field/etc that they play on. This Wednesday, I had my first actual athlete model, Joe, he's a cross country runner here at Clark. I had a bit of lighting help though from Frank and Michael, they showed me a few tricks and then I took some photos. I'm not really sure what I want at the moment, which is the problem. However, I'm trying to figure that out and in the meantime I'm just kind of going with it. So here are a few shots from Wednesday :) I attempted to show some different poses (or the same poses with different lighting) and then my favorites too I guess.

So these are just a few, I mean I only edited about 30 or so images out of the many I took. But this first session was about experimenting with lighting. So I am aware in some of these photos that the black background isn't actually behind him as I wanted but I'll figure that out later on. I just need to try different ways to light someone's face or body using the lights in the studio and various reflectors. But he was very patient and wonderful throughout the whole... I think it was around 2 hours. And it definitely gave me renewed hope in this whole experiment. However, at the same time, I still have a long way to go before I'll be really happy. Because while I can now adequately use the studio lights, I'm still very limited (both in the space itself and with the lights available). Ideally, I think I would like to take pictures on the court, field, in the pool, etc. However, that poses the problem of that lighting and finding a time when the space is available as well as the model and everything else. But it would add a lot more dimension to the images, make the more interesting and give me a bit more freedom in terms of poses. But who knows, I have a lot of ideas running through my head in general. Like if I were to put this in book form, if I had an action shot of the athlete on the right page and their portrait on the left. Or just in some way incorporate the two halves as a whole. It'll come to me eventually. What I'm trying to focus on now is coming up with ideas for poses and looking into how plausible location shooting would be. So until next time :)