One-light wonder

It's amazing what you can do with one off-camera strobe and a little help from your friends.

The assignment from sports editor Tim Candon was a portrait of Cary High School tennis phenom Justin Radloff. Conveniently enough, uber-portrait-shooter Jeff Camarati (he of the no web page) and I had been discussing just this very type of shot the week before.

Unfortunately, my crutch Jeff wasn't available to do it for me help out, so I headed off to the courts to fend for myself.

Fortunately, Justin is a great guy who was more than willing to get into the shoot after he finished trouncing Tim in a fast game (sorry, no pictures of that -- I promised Tim I wouldn't embarass him). So with a single SB-80 on a stand to camera left, we spent about 20 minutes having Tim throw tennis balls as I convinced Justin to break every rule of good tennis form in pursuit of the perfect picture. And if I do say so myself, I think we did a pretty good job.

For the mechanics, I metered the ambient exposure and underexposed by about two stops to bring the sky and clouds down and make Justin "pop." I'm lying on the ground (one of the top 10 techniques they don't teach you in photo-j school) and pointing a prefocused 15mm at Justin. When I yelled "go," Tim would toss a ball in the air, Justin would jump and I would pull the trigger while praying that he didn't sprain an ankle...

As always, many thanks to David Hobby at Strobist for his invaluable inspiration on off-camera lighting techniques.

The June issue of Tar Heel Monthly magazine is here. Big ups to UNC pitcher and fifth-year senior Matt Danford for going with the flow and getting into the cover shoot. The young'uns on the staff gave him an "All-American Grandpa" shirt (a not-so-subtle dig at his "advanced" age), and we bribed convinced him it would be a great prop for the shoot.

I'm standing on a small ladder, and Danford is lit by a single Alien Bee monolight with a 10-degree grid. Shot in the infield grass to give a clean background. We tried about 20 frames of him tearing open his jersey to reveal the shirt underneath. Shot with a Canon 1DM2 and 17-40 lens.

I showed him the whole shoot on the back of the camera, and he seemed pleased, which is a good thing. As a general rule of thumb, never irritate a man who can throw things at you at 90+ miles per hour...

As mentioned in an earlier post, many thanks to Jeff Camarati for his assistance, the loan of his Alien Bee 1600 unit and his never-ending willingness to answer my stupid lighting questions.

Pitcher Perfect

It's a bad pun. Get used to it.

Mix two high school softball pitchers, a coach who wasn't warned I was coming and a five-minute window, and what do you get?

If you're me, you plagarize a shoot from earlier in the week, and you down't feel bad at all when you do it.

Lighting guru and best bud Jeff Camarati (I'd link to him, but he's too lazy between web pages right at the moment) helped me set up the Matt Danford photo at UNC's Boshamer Stadium two days earlier, so I borrowed the technique of a single strobe, high off-camera to the left, at full power to knock down the background as much as I could. Of course, an Alien Bee 1600 punched out a lot more light than an SB-80, so the results aren't quite as striking, but that's life as a newspaper photographer.

Fortunately, freshman Darby Pearce (left) and junior Beth Ann Kleekamp were great sports who were easy to work with, willing to let me interrupt their pre-game preparations, and they didn't laugh when I laid down in the dirt to get just the right angle for the shot.

And I hope I had nothing to do with the fact they lost 3-2 in 12 innings...

Long time lurker, first time blogger

Matt Danford

UNC supersenior Matt Danford is the grandfather of the Tar Heel pitching staff.

Shot as part of a feature package for the June 2007 issue of Tar Heel Monthly magazine.

For those of you who care about this sort of thing, it was shot with a Canon EOS 1DM2 camera, 17-40 lens, and lit with an Alien Bee 1600 monolight at full power with a 10-degree grid. The photographer (that's me) was lying on the ground to make this particular frame.