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.
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Check out Hakeem’s “LA Gear” kicks.[/caption]
It took several days of pre-production phone calls to source our 1.25 inch thick, 5′ x 8′ sheet of optically clear Plexi. We finally found a piece in Ft. Lauderdale, and had it trucked in for the shoot. It wasn’t cheap.
Cy Cyr, a great SI assistant from Orlando who I’ve worked with many times over the years, helped out by picking up our additional rental gear, and then accompanying me to the Rays Spring Training location in Port Charlotte. Armando Solares and Chip Litherland, both great photographers from Sarasota, agreed to help out as well. A 400 lb , 5′ x 8′ sheet of Plexiglas is incredibly heavy and difficult to move, so we needed all that extra muscle to assemble the set.
When I did the Hakeem picture, we placed the Plexi on a set of wooden boxes that were only 2-3 feet off the ground, which limited our lens choice to a super-wide, and it really was not enough room to work properly. This time, I decided to erect a platform of heavy-duty construction scaffolding, which gave us an elevation of five feet. At that distance, I was able to use a variety of lenses.
Once the scaffolding was delivered and assembled, we unloaded the glass (which took 6 people), secured everything, and strapped it to the scaffolding. Ground stakes with cargo tie-downs and a ton of sandbags made the whole set very safe and secure. The last thing I needed was to injure the Rays star player!
The biggest issue with shooting a photo like this is unwanted reflections. We covered the inside of the scaffolding, ground, and back of the set with black drape, essentially creating a “black box” for me to shoot from. For lighting, we used a Plume Wafer Hexoval 140 (the medium one) as our main light, positioning it just above the plexi, but a little lower than usual to illuminate Evan under his hat. We then added a medium stip bank with a 40 degree grid, from below the glass, right behind my head. This light gave us some fill, and illuminated the soles of Longoria’s shoes. We used two lights from behind the set with regular reflectors to outline Longoria and his bat, and separate him from the background. All of the lights used were Profoto 7B’s.
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LightTrac is an awesome tool for planning a shoot.[/caption]
Once we had everything set, we peeled the protective adhesive paper off the plexiglas, shot some tests (in socks!), and did our final preparations before Longoria arrived. The time of day was not ideal: we were shooting at 3:30pm, rather than 5pm, so the sun was still a problem. although we had chosen our location carefully based on recon from the Ipad app LightTrac (which shows the sun path on a google map satellite photo), we still had some sunlight to deal with.
We erected an 8 x 8 on Matthews hi-rollers to block the sunlight , although we did toy with the prospect of putting Cy in a tractor bucket with a large golf umbrella, due to the heavy winds in the area. Armando and Chip did a great job of keeping the 8×8 from blowing away during the shoot.
We had about 30 minutes for the shoot, and Longoria was great during the whole thing. He even got into it at the end and started making some great faces, screaming while pretending to knock the cover off the ball.
Check out the cool time lapse video that Cy shot for us which chronicles the entire shoot start to finish.
Robert Seale photo shoot time lapse from Robert Seale on Vimeo.
And, yes, of course – we had to shoot some pictures of ourselves as well!
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Cy Cyr, Armando Solares, Chip Litherland, and me doing the “mush-face” pose after the shoot.[/caption]
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A cool view from underneath. (Photo by Chip Litherland)[/caption]
Magazine photography
Robert Seale shoots Coach K at Duke
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.
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!
Seale shoots portraits for COLORS Magazine
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.
Studio portrait photography with NASA Astronauts
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.
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.)
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.
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.
You can see more of the astronaut portraits on the regular website of Houston photographer Robert Seale.
Lance Armstrong in 4 minutes flat
UPDATE 8/24/2012: Lance Armstrong Portrait photographs available – contact us directly for information.
I recently had the opportunity to photograph seven time Tour de France champ and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong in Austin, Texas for an editorial client.
Lance was preparing for his Tour de France comeback, so he was only in Austin for one or two days in the time period that would make our deadline, so there was a very narrow window to schedule the shoot.
Celebrities have lots of demands on their time, and are often dealing with tons of requests for interviews, photo shoots, etc. Lance preparing for the Tour was no exception. On the day we were shooting him, he had a charity event scheduled, two or three television interviews, a live radio broadcast, and our shoot….all crammed between 7:30 and 9am, so that he could train the rest of the day.
Lance owns a really cool bike shop in downtown Austin called Mellow Johnny’s, and the shoot (as well as the other events) was scheduled for the bike shop location. We scouted the shop the day before, and determined that the best location would be in the basement area of the shop, where we could essentially set up a studio shoot, away from the charity event crowd and his other interviews. For the shots of Lance, we knew ahead of time, that we were only going to get a portrait of him in a Livestrong t-shirt. He was not going to pose in a jersey and bike helmet, he wasn’t going to pose on a bike….it wasn’t going to happen, so, in a way, it simplified things. The question then became, how many looks can we get out of a black t-shirt portrait in 4 minutes?
With limited time and no props, and no environment, I decided to try to get as many different looks as possible in the short time frame available. If you try to move a celebrity around to multiple locations, or move lighting equipment during the shoot, you are wasting their time, and you risk the shoot being over even quicker. The best way to photograph them and get multiple looks, is through careful planning, and essentially encircling them with all the lighting equipment you’re going to use.
I decided on three shots: The first would be a double rimlit tight portrait, with a small stripbank over camera; the second shot would be a broad softbox source –a large Plume Hexoval 180 slightly from the side; the third shot, would be a dramatic profile, lit with a Plume Wafer 100 with a Lighttools 30 degree fabric grid, with a projection of a bike wheel centered behind his head.
We started with a grey seamless backdrop, because we knew in the limited space that we had, we could use it as a grey/tan backdrop, we could make it go black, or if necessary, the art director could make a clip path and turn the background white….it gave us a range of options.
We arrived early, near 5:30am and began our setup. Each lighting setup was plugged in to a different set of power packs, so that we could switch between setups simply by turning power packs on and off. This kept things organized and simple, and allowed us to get multiple looks without fumbling around, switching heads, packs, stands, etc.
Andrew Loehman, the assistant on the shoot, actually hung a real bike wheel from a piece of fishing line, and held it at the proper distance between the background and the light to create the shadow of the wheel on the wall. A custom Dynalite projection spot provided the light. With more time, we could have created a custom bike wheel “cookie” for the spot, but with limited prep time, an actual wheel was used to provide the signature bike wheel shape.
Lance was in and out of our setup in about 4 minutes. Other than turning his body 90 degrees for the profile shot, he never moved, and even with that limited amount of time, without changing his wardrobe, and without a bike, we were able to give the art director several looks to choose from for the story.
(All photos © 2009 Robert Seale. All Rights Reserved. – please do not post, right- click, steal, or otherwise use any of our photos without permission. For licensing info, contact Robert Seale Photography through the “Contact Info” link on the right)
