A modern dancer from BYU, photographed with a Plume Wafer Hexoval 180.
Back in June, I had the good fortune to be invited to speak at the 50th annual University Photographers Association of America (UPAA) Symposium in Utah. The UPAA is comprised of photographers who work on staff for universities. I get a little more nervous when speaking to seasoned professionals rather than college students.
Brigham Young University was the host for this years’ event, and two of my favorite photographers, Canon Explorer of Light Art Wolfe and Donald Miralle were also on the bill this year. Not bad company!
My portion began with a morning lecture on the BYU campus in Provo. After lunch, the convention moved three hours south, to Bryce Canyon National Park. Once there, my old Sporting News colleague August Miller, (who is now a Salt Lake City commercial photographer), and I scouted quickly for suitable locations for an evening lighting demonstration. We had to find locations that were attractive, but that could also accomodate 80 or so photographers. We chose to stay around Red Canyon, adjacent to Bryce Canyon because of the crowd.
Our hosts, BYU photographers Mark Philbrick and Jaren Wilkey arranged for a wonderful modern dancer to help us out by posing for our sunset demo.
I really enjoyed teaching at the workshop and meeting all the professional university photographers from all over the country and from as far away as Australia and Israel. Mark and Jaren put on a first class event.
A long exposure, mixed with strobe in a running stream creates a ghostly effect.
Osteen, lit from overhead with a Wafer Hexoval 140.
I recently photographed Joel Osteen, a popular televangelist and the pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas for the cover of USA Weekend. Lakewood Church is the largest congregation in the country, with over 43,000 worshippers attending every week. Osteen also writes books, including his New York Times Bestseller, Your Best Life Now.
Joel’s wife, Victoria, is a co-pastor of the church. I photographed her previously for a health magazine cover story. I met Joel briefly during that shoot, when I asked them to join their kids on a trampoline at their home. They were really great sports. Both are both super nice people and great photographic subjects.
Lakewood renovated the 16,000 seat Compaq Center, the Houston Rockets former arena (known earlier as The Summit), and holds several church services there each week.
The cover shot.
As part of the assignment, I was also assigned to shoot an actual church service at Lakewood, and this made for a great scouting trip. It was great being able to witness the service, watch Joel and Victoria’s mannerisms, and study the lighting looks and locations available in the building for our portrait shoot later that week.
For the cover shot, we scouted an area in the church with a plain, warm wall (no need for a seamless this time), and set up one background light to create a gradient “glow” behind Osteen. We then lit him with two lights set up in a corner lighting pattern. Our warm background was changed to a bright purple in post (the story was running Easter weekend…). Before we finished, I turned off half of the corner setup and just used a boom light over his head. It made a dramatic photo that turned out to be my favorite frame from the shoot.
I should tell you about the (minimal) side effects of Propecia: in the first week of treatment, I had a headache, and my hair started to fall out a bit more often; but within the second week, everything improved, and my hair stopped to fall out. Within a month of treatment the new hair started to grow. After 8 months of treatment, my hair restored completely, but I decided to extend the course for another two months to strengthen the effect.
Though I knew it might not be simple enough for the cover, I knew it was important to try to capture the size of the church in some of the photos. We set up another very simple setup on the stage inside the auditorium of the church: a Plume Wafer 100 with a 30 degree Lighttools grid. I had the lighting guys from the church bring up the lights over the audience and turn on a follow spot for us, high in the catwalks. At first the spots weren’t showing well, so we asked the lighting director to fog the room for about an hour before the shoot, so that the smoky haze would make the spotlight beams show up in the background.
The stage setup, photographed with one Wafer 100 with a 30 degree grid.
It was interesting to be in the building again where I photographed so many Rockets games, including both their championship runs in 94 and 95. I spent many an hour hanging remote cameras and strobe packs on those same catwalks we were now using to light up a portrait of a preacher.
Since March Madness is in the air, I thought now would be a great time to share a shoot I recently did with Mike Krzyzewski at Duke. The assignment was a cover story for USA Weekend magazine (a Sunday newspaper insert with a whopping circulation of over 22 million!).
“Coach K” (yes, we all have trouble spelling his name…) is an icon at Duke (currently # 3 in the AP top 25), and a Number 1 seed in the west bracket of the 2011 NCAA Tournament, and he’s led the Duke Blue Devils to 4 NCAA Championships and 11 Final Four appearances. He was elected to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2001, when his current crop of players were 8-9 years old.
Because of Coach K’s demanding schedule and celebrity status on campus (he apparently gets mobbed when he lingers on campus too long), we elected to shoot him inside the controlled environment of the Duke practice facility (the main floor at Cameron was in use).
We had a tight 15-20 minute window, and needed several looks – at a minimum, we needed a cover image and an inside photo for the magazine.
The open "corner lighting" setup - used as the opener inside
One of the critical things about shooting a cover, is finding ways to simplify the picture – particularly the background, so that the composition works with the publication’s logo, and that there is enough room for the various cover lines. An added challenge, in the case of a Sunday insert is keeping tones and colors in a range that is printable by literally hundreds of different newspaper printing facilities all over the country.
On this shoot, I had the added treat of working with a vastly overqualified “assistant”, my old Sporting News photographer colleague Bob Leverone. He was not only a big help with pulling off the shoot, but he also took me on a short Carolina BBQ tour after we wrapped. (Sidebar: We sampled pulled pork at four of North Carolina’s most famous cue joints around the state, but the best by far was the barbeque we had at Dan Huntley’s place. Huntley is the author of Extreme Barbeque, and a former Charlotte Observer columnist. He is the real deal, and I’m a BBQ snob from Texas…. …ok, end of sidebar – back to the shoot.)
We settled on three lighting setups: a simple, blue padded background with fairly open corner lighting with a graduated “glow” in the background; a second, more dramatically lit setup with a row of sideline chairs; and an elevated look from a ladder with a simple background of court flooring.
For the cover, the photo editor (a longtime client, and wonderful guy to work with, who also accompanied us on the shoot) chose a dramatic tight shot of Coach K with a ball looking off camera, taken during our more dramatic setup with the chairs. We shot it with a Plume Wafer 100 with a 30 degree Lighttools grid, and a bare reflector head aimed at the wall behind him.
I’ll talk more about my corner lighting setup in an upcoming post.
Best of luck to Coach K and Duke in this month’s tournament. Perhaps he’ll get to visit us here in Texas later this month at the Final Four!
A pensive Coach K, taken with a Wafer 100 with a 30 degree Lighttools grid.
I recently was assigned a portrait for COLORS, a very cool, artsy Italian magazine. COLORS is published by Fabrica, a creative think tank sponsored by Benetton. COLORS publishes each issue according to a different theme, and the latest issue (No. 79: Winter 2010-2011) is all about collectors.
Featured in the magazine, are profiles on people who collect toasters, tea bags, vacuum cleaners, dinosaur statues, etc. There was even one collector who collected items and memorabilia from the now mothballed Concorde.
My assignment was to shoot Becky Martz, the foremost collector of banana labels in the world. Yes folks….banana labels. She has over 10000 in her collection.
The photo editor was kind enough to send us some samples so that we could match lighting and mood to the spare style favored by the magazine. This was important, as there were other photographers who were working on this project in various locales throughout the world. Each layout was identical, so it was necessary to match the lighting so that the magazine had a unified look.
We decided to have a little fun with it, and we posed Becky with a variety of bananas as props, mimicking a pistol, a telephone, an infant, and even a bunch of bananas as the old “idea” light bulb over her head (which ended up being the main photo in the layout). We did all the photos in a makeshift studio that we set up in her living room.
We also shot close ups and details of her label collection, resulting in three spreads in the Winter 2011 issue.The magazine has received quite a bit of publicity, including a mention by the NYT Magazine Culture blog.
Two of the spreads from the Winter 2010-2011 issue of COLORS.
If you ever want to feel bad about yourself and what you’ve accomplished in life, sit down for an afternoon and read astronaut bios. They represent the best of Type-A overachievers. They are an incredibly exclusive group – you have much better odds of being hit by lightning, winning the lottery, or becoming a rock star than orbiting Earth in space.
Last summer, I had the rare opportunity to photograph a group of astronauts who had all been major players in the Space Shuttle program for a magazine that I’ve always wanted to work for: Air & Space. I had a fabulous editor who was one of the most supportive and collaborative professionals with whom I’ve ever worked.
The working title of the piece was “Shuttlenauts”, and I was able to photograph many of the key people who shaped the program.
You might be asking: “Gee, dude – why aren’t these portraits environmental, with launch pads, shuttles, mission control, underwater training tanks, etc. in the backgrounds?” That would have been fun to do, but these current and former astronauts were assembled in one room (in various groupings) for two, 1-hour sessions, on separate days, several weeks apart. Some have since retired or joined the private sector, and some have taken management positions within NASA…..hence, not everyone would be in cool orange ACES high altitude pressure suit – in fact, many of them were going to be in street clothes. When working in a situation like this, with limited time, and lots of different outfits, I feel it’s best to simplify and unify the essay with a common background technique.
Shuttle Commander Eileen Collins; a group shot of “Station Builders.”
There’s a great Richard Avedon quote about simplification: ” I have a white background. I have the person I’m interested in, and the thing that happens between us.”
Since we were photographing everyone on a standard backdrop, and some of the shots were large groups, I used something I like to call “corner lighting.” I’ll write more about this in a future post, but it’s basically a way to light large groups, or open up shadows on an individual portrait while still retaining some direction and shape. I think it works well, and is much more pleasing to the eye than standard “butterfly” lighting schemes or (God-forbid)…. ringlfash.
Although these pictures originally ran in color in the magazine, I’ve really decided I quite like them in black and white. The originals were captured as raw files with Canon EOS1Ds Mk III cameras. I did the black and white conversions in Adobe Photoshop CS5 from 16-bit TIFF files exported from Lightroom. Using Photoshop CS5’s “Black and White” adjustment tool. I set the reds at 60, yellows at 90, with the hue adjustment at 39, and the saturation at 4 to add a little warmth to the tones. I left the other colors untouched.
I’ve photographed sports stars and other celebrities, and I’m rarely starstruck, but I was just absolutely blown away to be in the same room with these people. As a kid, I really wanted to be a fighter pilot (who didn’t?), and many of the astronauts began their careers as Navy or Air Force pilots, and eventually many of them were top test pilots before joining the astronaut corps. These are my kind of people! (Blog sidebar: So, I gave up on the whole Air Force fighter pilot thing when I had to get glasses for my then 20/400 vision in 8th grade….so what career did the legally blind guy choose?….what else? A photographer. Hmmm.)
Veteran astronaut and STS-1 Commander John Young.
As for the actual shoot, we photographed some of them individually and some in small groups according to various themes as follows:
– the entire STS-134 crew, including Commander Mark Kelly (which at the time was slated to be the last shuttle mission.)
–John Young: Young is a total badass. He’s perhaps the most famous and accomplished astronaut. He’s a former Navy fighter pilot and test pilot. He’s been in space on 6 missions in 3 different eras of the US space program. He served as the commander of the first shuttle mission, and also STS-9, Gemini 3, Gemini 10, Apollo 10, and Apollo 16 (yes, he not only walked on the moon, but he also drove the lunar rover on the surface). Young was also Chief of the Astronaut office, and served on several backup crews, including Apollo 13. He is 80 years old, and reportedly still attends weekly briefings at NASA.
–Robert Crippen: Crippen is the astronaut most identified with the Shuttle era: he flew with Young on STS-1, and later served as commander of STS-7, STS-41C, and STS-41G; he also ran Kennedy Space Center, and was Director of the Shuttle program for NASA)
–Eileen Collins: Collins was the first female Shuttle commander (on STS-93), and also flew on STS-63, STS-84, and STS-114, when she was the commander of the first “Return to flight” mission after the Columbia accident)
-Pam Melroy: A former Air force test pilot, Melroy was pilot on STS-92, and STS-112, and served as commander of STS-120.
-“High Timers” : Three of the astronauts who have spent the most total time in space: Peggy Whitson: Now head of the astronaut office, Whitson has spent over 376 days in space during two stays on the ISS; Michael Lopez-Alegria: The spacewalk king. A veteran of three missions, he holds the record for EVA’s (10), and total EVA time (over 67 hours); Franklin Chang-Diaz, a veteran of seven shuttle missions.
– “Station Builders”: Astronauts who played a major part in building the International Space Station (ISS): Robert Curbeam, Suni Williams, Ken Cockrell, and Leroy Chiao. These guys were a great group and lots of fun. (I learned from them that former Navy pilots who are astronauts (Cockrell, Williams, Curbeam) wear brown boots with their NASA flight suits, vs. the standard black boots….It’s a Naval aviator thing.)
-Mae Jemison and Anna Fisher: both were MD’s as well as pioneering female astronauts
Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger: A former Earth science teacher, Metcalf-Lindenburger, only 34, has already flown as a mission specialist on STS-131.
Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger; Andrew Feustel
There were of course some key people involved in the program that we did not have the opportunity to photograph, due to scheduling problems, but I’m hoping to continue photographing other astronauts and adding to this collection over the next couple of years.
I don’t often have my picture made with the people I photograph. It seems a little weird to ask, I’m shy, and it’s just sort of strange. I have photos of me with James Brown and Spike Lee, and that’s about it. Near the end of the shoot, while shooting a group shot of the female astronauts, they playfully started kicking up their heels “chorus line” style. Once we stopped laughing, (there was lots of laughing) they insisted I join them. How could I refuse? It was a blast and made for an awesome behind the scenes souvenir photo.
Easily the highest IQ chorus line ever assembled (even with me handicapping the group).
You can see more of the astronaut portraits on the regular website of Houston photographer Robert Seale.
I was very excited to be able to shoot the January cover of Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine. I shot this assignment last summer during one of two, aproximately 1-hour photo sessions with current and former Shuttle astronauts (more on the rest of the shoot later), at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The cover was to feature the first and last Space Shuttle commanders, John Young (STS-1), and Mark Kelly (STS-134). NASA has since added another mission, STS-135, to the schedule so our premise about first and last became a cover and 8-page photo essay of astronaut portraits during the 30th anniversary of the Space Shuttle program.
We had very little time to shoot the cover and subsequent inside images due to Kelly’s busy training schedule, so we arrived early and prepared two backgrounds….a black cloth background and a large white seamless. Robert Crippen, Young’s pilot on the first Shuttle mission, arrived early, so we spent a few minutes photographing him on both backgrounds.
I knew that Young would probably show up in his signature white turtleneck and blazer, and that Kelly would very likely be wearing a polo shirt (the outfit in which astronauts commonly work and train). For a cover, especially a fairly tight portrait, I knew it would be important to have something in the picture that “says NASA” so I asked both men, through the astronaut office, to bring their blue nomex NASA-issued flight jackets. I wasn’t sure that they would both remember to bring their jackets (I was really nervous that Young might not still have his). I was anxious about this small detail, but relieved when Kelly showed up first, carrying his. I was overjoyed when Young turned the corner into our building carrying a weathered NASA flight jacket just like Kelly’s. It may sound like a small detail, but it was critical – and really the only thing that holds the picture together for a cover, and makes the photo something other than two men wearing blue blazers. I think I actually jumped up and down in front of the NASA media rep.
We had the black background pre-lit with a Plume Wafer Hexoval 180 on the right as our main light, and a Wafer 100 with a Lighttools grid as our “hairlight” on the left behind them. We fitted the hairlight with a slight blue gel, which I thought would look good, and closely match the blue flight jackets – outlining the shapes of the subject heads against our black background.
For some reason, I really like pictures of people looking off camera, with no eye contact. To me it just feels more heroic and formal. This was a perfect and appropriate opportunity to use that pose, so in addition to shooting portraits with eye contact, I had both men look off camera, up into the Hexoval 180 for the heroic portrait fitting the first and last commanders of the Shuttle program. It was honor to meet them and photograph them.
(Note: A month after this cover was released by Air & Space, Mark Kelly’s wife, US Representative Gabrielle Giffords was critically injured in a mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Kelly has been by her side throughout her ordeal, and has only recently returned to training for STS-134, after she was moved to a rehab facility in Houston. Our thoughts and prayers are with Giffords and Kelly, and we hope she makes a speedy and full recovery.)
Ernest H. Cockrell with a glass butterfly display in the foreground.
As a corporate photographer, I’m called upon to do executive portraits of CEO’s and local business leaders. Ernest H. Cockrell is a longtime Texas energy business executive who is also very well known in his hometown of Houston for his philanthropy. Over the years he’s given millions of dollars to a number of causes, notably the University of Texas (his alma mater), and the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
Most Houstonians recognize the Cockrell name from the namesake Cockrell Buterfly Center, a giant glass annex to the Houston Museum of Natural Science, built several years ago containing a tropical butterfly habitat, rain forest, a 50 foot tall waterfall, and thousands of butterflies. After receiving a commision to photograph Mr. Cockrell for the University of Texas, I decided that this would be the perfect location for his portrait.
He had very little time on this particular day, and one of the things I’m very proud of, is being able to create several different scenarios in the same location without making the subject wait around on us to move lights and change our setup.
Although I fully planned on shooting him in the rain forest habitat, hoping to get a few butterflies in the picture, I quickly found another area in the children’s educational center of the museum, adjacent to the rain forest that offered some interesting but challenging visual possibilities.
We had a very limited amount of time (about 15 minutes), so I chose an area where we could get several shots in one location. A large wooden display inside the educational area contained 2 large vertical pieces of glass which contained a static display of butterflies who had generously donated their bodies to science. The space was tight, with interactive displays for kids, a weird corner wall behind the display, and built in stools for children everywhere. I thought that we might be able to light the butterflies, and shoot through the glass, placing our subject’s face on the other side of the glass wall.
After tinkering with the lighting and composition, we decided to backlight the butterflies from each side behind the glass, and we maneuvered a Plume Wafer 75 with a Lighttools 30 degree grid into place outside of the visible frame as the subject main light to reduce spill onto the glass. We used grids on the two backlights (a 20 and 30 degree, as I recall), and the left backlight conveniently served as a hair-light for Mr. Cockrell. Rosco cinefoil was used to gobo the backlights and prevent flare. The background was a corner wall, and was very close, so my assistant, Nathan Lindstrom was put in charge of holding a 6 x 6 black felt Scrim Jim in place behind our subject to give us a nice black background behind the multi-colored butterflies.
The space between the glass panes was quite wide, and reflections around the butterflies were an issue, so much so, that I toyed with retouching reflections in post. I finally settled on leaving the photograph as it was originally shot, after deciding that the reflections actually added a feeling of motion to the picture – almost as if we had used a slow flash sync with actual moving butterflies. (“Yeah….I meant to do that….”)
The second shot with the butterfly shadows on the wall.
The second picture was created by utilizing a small section of our cramped corner wall. We set up another light with a snoot to narrow the flash to a very small beam, and placed it about 20 feet away from the glass, at a slight angle to the wall. This created a pattern of distorted butterfly shadows on the background. We turned off our background lights from the last picture, and removed the black Scrim Jim from the set.
We had Mr. Cockrell step about 2 feet to the side to get him away from the snoot spotlight which was creating our background, and we moved his Wafer 75 main light over a few feet to keep him (but not the background) lit correctly with the small softbox. I then moved about 90 degrees and shot towards the wall, creating the shadow picture. We did all this in about 10 minutes, utilizing our remaining 5 minutes just outside the nearby doors in the rain forest habitat where a third setup with a Profoto 7B was waiting.
For almost 11 years, I shot lots of baseball. As one of three photographers at The Sporting News (the nation’s oldest national sports magazine, founded in 1886), I was lucky to be among the few photojournalists to attend and cover the World Series each and every year.
As a freelancer, I don’t get the opportunity to shoot baseball games much anymore, although I still shoot a lot of sports portraits. I thought I would use the Texas Rangers first ever appearance in the Fall Classic to show off some portraits I did earlier this year of one of my favorite sports icons.
Nolan Ryan is now the President of the Texas Rangers, the last team for whom he pitched before his retirement in 1993 after a stunning 27 seasons in the major leagues. In addition to his 6th and 7th no-hitters, Ryan had another famous moment as a Texas Ranger. In 1993, just before his retirement, Robin Ventura charged the mound on Ryan, who was easily old enough to be his father. Ryan made quick work of Ventura, putting him into a steer-hold with his left arm and pummeling him with his right. Two of my sports photography colleagues, Linda Kaye, and Brad Loper, got great photos of the altercation. I’m not sure why, but I loved that moment: it was awesome to see an old scrappy Texas cowboy holding his own against a young punk. For better or worse, this forever tainted my view of Ventura, and solidified what I already knew: Nolan Ryan is a badass.
As a kid growing up near Houston, I occasionally had the opportunity to attend games at the Astrodome. Ryan’s pitching prowess was the main attraction on those teams in the early 80’s, although, I must admit I was probably equally impressed with the Astros massive Lite-britescoreboard (hey, I was a kid…). One of my early baseball memories was of sneaking out of class and hiding out in the band hall to watch Ryan pitch in the 1986 NLCS with my high school band director, who was a big Astros fan.
Earlier this season, I shot a group portrait of Ryan, Rangers pitching coach Mike Maddux, and the Rangers pitching staff for Sports Illustrated. The highlight for me, was taking a quick opportunity after the shoot to take a few frames of Ryan alone. I photographed him with a long lens, looking down the row of archways at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington. We hid a Profoto 7b behind one of the archways with a Plume Wafer 75 equipped with a Lighttools 30-degree grid (to contain the light on Ryan’s face and upper body without too much spillage on the scene). Although I don’t use gels much anymore, we also used the old tungsten film trick here, setting the EOS1Ds Mark III to tungsten to add a Rangers blue cast to the scene, and then adding a 1 1/4 CTO gel to the strobe to filter Ryan’s face back to warmish daylight. At the end of the session, I asked Nolan to show me his famous fastball grip.
Nolan Ryan’s fastball grip, Arlington, Texas, April 28, 2010.
Best of luck to Ryan and his Rangers in the upcoming Series.
The Sports Illustrated China cover[/caption]
Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, was recently the subject of a cover story for Sports Illustrated-China, and I was lucky enough to get the call to photograph him for the story. We hatched all sorts of ideas for poses and locations around Houston. I’ve photographed Yao several times over the years, so I really wanted to take a memorable shot of him, especially since the last photograph of him I took in a memorable location outside, featured the Rockets old uniform design.
After further investigation, it quickly became apparent that my quintessential shot of Yao in the new Rockets uniform was not going to happen. You see, Yao didn’t have a uniform.
Most people don’t understand, especially after years of watching players like Dennis Rodman ripping off their jerseys and throwing them to the crowd, that most players only have a couple of uniforms for the whole season. In Yao’s case, he spent all of last year rehabbing his broken foot, and his uniforms were either a.) long ago auctioned off to various charities; or b.) never ordered in the first place. The uniforms for the 2010-2011 season, we found out, were not yet ordered, and so we found ourselves in uniform purgatory.
This severely limited our options. Sports Illustrated-China decided they didn’t want to go with workout gear, or a basketball setting at all, but instead asked me to photograph Yao “GQ style”, in a suit and tie in a controlled studio environment.
We arranged to have Yao come after practice to a local photo studio, where he did the interview with star SI writer Jon Wertheim, followed by a quick photo shoot. SI assistant Andrew Loehman helped me set up 2 different sets, with three totally different lighting looks. We used Profoto 7A packs and Plume light modifiers. We pre-tested and choreographed the shoot, since we didn’t think he would stay long. Andrew stood on a stool to stand in for Yao’s test frames.
Since we didn’t have a cool outdoor location or props to work with, I asked Yao to bring a suit and also a black t-shirt, so we could shoot a nice tight portrait of his face on white and also with a primary red background, the Rockets main team color.
I photographed him with white, grey, and primary red backgrounds in both clothing changes. Strangely enough, a loose frame I took offhandedly, just to show the scale of Yao’s size (and the fact that he wouldn’t fit on the backdrop), ended up being the 2-page spread in the magazine (Go figure…). The cover was altered with a golden background from the original white/grey. I’ve included the layouts as they ran in the magazine, and a few of the originals we took.
Yao arrived alone in a large Toyota SUV, and was very accomodating. Although he had declined our offer to have food/catering there for him at the shoot, as he sat down to talk to Jon, his stomach grumbled a bit. I offered to run down the street and pick up a Whataburger for him. Yao looked very interested, and ordered a double meat Whataburger with bacon, cheese, and fries. He then gave me a sheepish look……” Just don’t tell my coach…” (Yao had recently lost a ton of weight during a pre-season diet-conditioning program.)
I didn’t tell him at the time, but I’m coming clean now.
Yao, I stole some of your fries.
[caption id="attachment_610" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Red background with a Plume Wafer 100 with Lighttools 30 degree grid[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_608" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Loose shot of Yao with a Plume Hexoval 180 on a cyc wall[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_612" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Plume Wafer Hexoval 140 on an overhead boom[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_615" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Another shot taken with the Plume Wafer Hexoval 180[/caption]
Tampa Bay Rays slugger Evan Longoria’s swing, through 1.25″ thick Plexiglas. ©2011 Robert Seale[/caption]
I recently photographed Evan Longoria of the Tampa Bay Rays in mid-swing through Plexiglas for the Sports Illustrated Baseball Preview issue. I photographed a similar shot of Houston Rockets center Hakeem Olajuwon years ago, and I ‘ve wanted to update that portrait for quite some time (it’s so old, he was actually wearing LA Gear shoes!). The cool photo editor at SI remembered my Hakeem photo and asked me to produce a similar shot of Longoria. Just to prove that there are very few new ideas in this world, he sent me an awesome John Zimmerman photo of Ted Williams from the 1950’s taken from below his feet through a glass floor!
The Longoria portrait was part of a series on baseball players who are the best in the league at hitting a certain pitch: best curveball hitter, best fastball hitter, etc. The essay was parceled out to several different photographers since some of the players were in Arizona and some were at Spring Training in Florida.
[caption id="attachment_713" align="alignleft" width="300"]
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The Sports Illustrated China cover[/caption]
Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, was recently the subject of a cover story for Sports Illustrated-China, and I was lucky enough to get the call to photograph him for the story. We hatched all sorts of ideas for poses and locations around Houston. I’ve 
