I’ve been doing some athlete photos lately and a specific look was requested. I already had an idea in mind, but this was some of my practice work for that. In these photos it is a two-light setup, though I ended up going with three lights for the actual photos. The major part is the back light which is high up behind the subject with the subject’s body hiding the light stand (though in one of the photos you can see a bit of it). This creates that light area around the front of the subject.
Actually, the major part of this photo is having strobes capable of high speed sync. This allows me to go faster with my shutter speed and really knocks out some of the ambient light. That’s important because these photos were taken outside, on a sunny day, around 3:30 PM. I knew this scenario was going to be similar to the times I’d be working with the athletes and that the sun would be the trickiest light to deal with. So, I set a scenario up where I could get rid of the sun.
Now, it didn’t totally eliminate the sunlight. I did have to do some processing trickery to finish things up, but this setup got me a good 85% of the way there, which is all I needed to make it look like this. Light and shadows are big parts of photography. The more you practice manipulating them, the more you will be able to work around seemingly impossible issues you encounter in your sessions.
In the actual session, I made things even easier by finding a shady area. That got me even closer, I’d say about 95% of the way there.