It’s been pretty busy the last few days, and I have been meaning to post this for several days now! Finally, it’s here. Everyone, I would like to introduce Joe!

Joe is the VAL I mentioned in the last post, but there’s a lot more to Joe than just a steady hand for a light (see the last post). In May I had received an assignment from the Lubbock Magazine to shoot a tailgating cover. This wasn’t to include just your normal everyday, beer-in-hand, sausage and jalapeno popper grilling tailgaters. They wanted football players in this one, the largest football players at Texas Tech University, in this shot, with two Heisman nominees serving them burgers.

After two months of coordinating the shot with whoever allows the athletes to be photographed (coordination by the magazine, superb job), about 10 hours of prep work (brainstorming, testing, setting up, burger cooking, meeting), and one heckuva hot day in July, we got the shot. I can’t take all the credit for the shot, because it was, as Shelly Gonzalez mentioned in her letter from the editor in the magazine, a team effort. Shoot, if Mike Leach, Tech football coach hadn’t pitched the idea of using the offensive line in the shot with the two others, it wouldn’t have even taken place!

Anyways, we were informed we only had about 15 minutes to get the shot, so, indeed, we had to be prepared. In lieu of safely meeting this time limit, we got to the football field about two and a half hours early to make sure we knew exactly where we could place the players in consideration for cover design (it’s not like we had the time for a location change). Joe and I checked the field over, and decided on the middle of the field (the original idea was to shoot with the uprights behind the crew, but I think that would have made the shot a little busy, especially for an already-packed photograph).

The shoot was going to take place at 3:30pm, not exactly magic hour in photography terms, but I love shooting at this time with artificial light, there’s so much punch you can get when using the ambient as a back light. Remember, I like simple lighting setups that you can get a lot out of, so this is what we had:

Like all prepared photographers, we tested the setup a few times, and thanks to the editorial folks from the magazine, including the editor of the Lubbock Avalanche Journal, doing the grillin’ in this one!

Without them, it would not have been as much fun, nor would the lights stayed up. True to Lubbock form, the wind was blowing just enough to disturb a perfectly great setup (i.e. the folks holding the lights). I can just imagine if I was using softboxes!

OK, the run down, two heads through a super large umbrella, camera left, and one bare head, barely camera right, just for the highlights. The photos don’t show it, but once we started shooting the models (ha, football players, models, eh), I used the white diffuser panels along the bottom of the lights to fill in some shadows in their legs. Basically, we surrounded the models with light, and I had to poke over the diffuser panels to shoot the photographs. I used a cross-lighting approach, using the ambient (sun) as a backlight, and you can notice the nice hard light on their backs, separating them from the background.

Here’s what it looked like without the lights:

A little burger tossing going on there! Herrell actually tossed those burgers 10 or 15 times before dropping one off of the spatula.

Again, with the lights:

We were done in roughly 10 minutes, no burgers were consumed, and seven rather large people fit in the frame (my big worry). Thanks again to Joe and the Lubbock Magazine crew! It’s shoots like this that keeps photographers like me having fun under pressure!