Photographic Lighting – Robert Seale's Blog

Sports and fitness photography with Kate Upton for Strong4Me Fitness

Model and actress Kate Upton photographed at her home in Houston, Texas for her new fitness brand, Strong 4 Me Fitness. ©2018 Robert Seale

I recently had the really cool opportunity to work with supermodel Kate Upton for the launch of her fitness brand, Strong4Me Fitness. Strong4Me is the brainchild of Kate and her personal trainer Ben Bruno and is designed to provide strength training and nutrition solutions for busy women on the go.

We were originally going to use a studio, but at the last minute, the shoot was shifted to Kate’s Houston area home which she shares with her husband, Astros ace pitcher Justin Verlander. The brief was to shoot portraits and workout shots that could be title and dividing pages on the Strong4Me site and app. Other models would fill in the blanks with the actual “how to” sequence shots.

Working in a home, no matter how well equipped and nice, provides some challenges, chief among them, finding enough wide open space to create light, bright, and open fitness scenarios. I was reminded of environmental portrait photographer Arnold Newman’s famous quote: “Photography is 5% inspiration, and 95% moving furniture.” That was certainly the case for assistants Travis Schiebel, Michael Klein and I as we cleared out spaces for these photos.

We created this look by covering the window outside with an 8×8 Scrim Jim, and firing some strobe from outside. The indoor key light was a Wafer Hexoval 140.

Once Houston makeup artist Misty Rockwell got her ready, we started with a white seamless background setup. One of the rooms in the house provided us with almost a perfect wide doorway scenario and lots of white walls, so we could set up a traditional white seamless without the need for cumbersome v-flats. Kate had her own ideas about the lighting and was very involved….after looking at a few frames on the digital tech’s monitor, she suggested a more contrasty look, so we switched gears, used a smaller key-light source (a medium sized Wafer Hex 140, instead of the huge box we were using before), and placed a large black velvet fabric on the ground in front of her to soak up some of the bounced light and create more shadow under the chin and neck area (her suggestion – which worked out great!).

Shooting someone of her talent and stature is an incredible thing…I’ve shot lots of models, famous athletes, and celebrities over the years, but no one like her. One second she’s talking to you, and everything seems pretty normal, but when the camera is raised, she brings it…..all the while making subtle adjustments to her pose, chin height, arm position, leg angles, to create perfect photos. It goes without saying, but she’s an incredibly talented pro….all I had to do was show up with a pulse and keep firing the shutter.

Kate’s dog Harley offered his own exercise tips to help us out with the photo shoot

After the white background scenario, we moved on to a “light and bright” airy high-key location in her dining room to do some shots with a workout bench and mat. Kate’s friendly boxer, Harley, who has his own instagram account, btw, wanted to be in most of the photos, so eventually we just went with it. Sometimes the spontaneous stuff is the most fun.

We next moved on to an outdoor setup, shot some exercise photos there, and finished with some shallow depth of field photos modeling the Strong4Me yoga mats available through her site.

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It was great working with her, and I wish her the best with both her fitness business and the recent birth of her daughter Genevieve. Harley might just have to share the spotlight next time around.

Check out the main portfolio site to see more of Houston Sports and Fitness photographer Robert Seale’s work.

Model and actress Kate Upton photographed at her home in Houston, Texas for Strong 4 Me Fitness. © 2018 Robert Seale

I don’t often do it, but this shoot called for a couple of crew photos with Kate. She was nice enough to oblige. ( L to R: Michael Klein, MUA Misty Rockwell, Kate, me, Travis Schiebel).

Kate Upton and Robert Seale….she’s really tall!

Sports and Fitness Photography with Carmen Morgan for Renew Houston

Fitness trainer Carmen Morgan, lit with a Profoto B-4 with a Plume Wafer 100 and a Lighttools grid.

Although we’ve been doing more commercial photography for the last decade or so, I’ve spent over 20 years doing sports photography – particularly sports portraits for magazines like The Sporting News and Sports Illustrated. I also used to do all the covers for the Houston Chronicle’s Health Magazine, but unfortunately, it went away a few years ago.

I was thrilled when I recently got the call from my friend, Features Managing Editor Melissa Aguilar to shoot for a new fitness product for the Chronicle titled “Renew Houston.” The new section would be a reboot of the Health Mag, but as a broadsheet section with fitness and health tips.

Our first subject was the stunningly beautiful and fabulously fit Carmen Morgan, a local certified fitness trainer with a ridiculous Instagram following of 620 THOUSAND followers. (@mytrainer carmen) She also has her own iPhone app available in the App Store.

I’m really into concrete backgrounds lately, so rather than shooting Carmen in a gym or crossfit studio, we decided to work with some superb concrete architecture generously provided by the Cindy Lisica gallery. Although we supplemented some of the photos with a Profoto B-4 strobe and Plume soft boxes, we shot many of the photos in the incredibly soft natural light tunnel at the gallery.

I have a dream to spend my wacation on the beach for a month. To have a beautiful shape I need to lose some wight. Phentermine is a real helper. It helped my sister to lose 10 lbs in two weeks. I hope to have the similiar result. Wish me good luck..

We sent Carmen through her paces in a couple of different outfits, all while Chronicle writer Joy Sewing interviewed Carmen about the keys to her success. It was a great shoot with great people. Hoping to hear more great things from Carmen in the future!

Carmen in her “Super Hero” outfit. Lit with a Plume Wafer 75 and a 30 degree Lighttools grid.

Carmen, lit with pure super soft natural light with my favorite concrete background.

Another available light portrait against the concrete – taken with a Canon 50mm/1.2 lens.

Heroic Group Photo of Life Flight Team for Memorial Hermann Foundation

The finished piece, designed by Pennebaker and retouched by Avenue Sixty7 in the UK.

Earlier this year, we worked on a very cool project for the Memorial Hermann Foundation. Memorial Hermann is one of the largest healthcare providers in the area, and they pioneered the use of helicopters in emergency medicine. “Life Flight” as it became known, was the brainchild of the Dr. “Red” Duke of the Memorial Hermann/UT Health Science Center. I had the honor of photographing him with a Life Flight helicopter a few years before he passed away for an editorial assignment.

Sometimes editorial assignment lead to commercial gigs, and it when it came time for a fundraiser for the Memorial Hermann Foundation, I was lucky enough to get the call to recreate the feel of that photo, albeit with a much larger group of people.

We worked with a stellar team of creatives at Pennebaker, including Halina Dodd and Stacey Hodge. Many ideas were tossed around during the planning stages, among them: taking a group shot on the helipad of the entire Life Flight team (over 100 people!), helicopters parked, a helicopter hovering in air over their shoulder, among other ideas. In the end, we opted for a representative sample of members of the Life Flight team: a nurse, a pilot, an ER trauma doc, etc….to show all the different folks that make the program work. The goal was to make a “Heroic portrait” ,movie poster-style featuring a selection of the Life Flight team.

If you’ve ever been around helicopter operations, you know that taking a group shot of one person, let alone 13 people, can present quite a challenge on a helipad with the rotor wash of helicopter blades. Add to that, uncertain winter weather, uncertain helicopter schedules (they can be called away on a real mission at any moment), and a windy helipad located many floors up on top of a high-rise hospital and you’ve got a very high possibility of failure.

Despite my desire to “nail it in camera” in one shot and avoid composites, it was obvious that this was not a plausible or safe scenario in which to photograph a large group of people with a ton of lighting equipment.

The solution: A 6am group shot inside the hospital combined with plates of the helipad, helicopter, and sky. John Lewis, Travis Schiebel, and Michael Klein agreed to help us on the shoot day with a ridiculously early 4:30am call time. I bribed them with promises of a giant diner breakfast after the shoot.

Reference group shot with a 24mm wide angle for the retoucher.

Individual shots from the same height/perspective with a longer focal length (105mm).

We knew one of the final uses of the photo was going to be a poster, so we wanted a super high resolution image. We used the 50 MP Canon EOS 5DS for the job. After nailing the arrangement in one frame (mostly as a reference frame for the retoucher), we kept the camera in the exact same position, then turned the camera vertically, zoomed in, and photographed the group in smaller pieces of 3-4 people at a time. The lighting setup (We used Profoto B-4 packs and heads, and a Plume Wafer Hexoval 180 as the main light source), and 20×20 white background were both rolled on large high-roller stands left to right in front of each smaller group of 3-4 subjects to maintain the same lighting look on everyone. When pieced together with the background elements, this yielded a huge final file size.

The clouds/sky plate, from an earlier shoot in New Mexico.

We also used a rental special effects wind machine to blow the subject’s hair and lab coats to make it look as if they were really on top of the rooftop helipad. In reality, the rotor wash would have caused hair to go everywhere and for everyone to freak out rather than holding a steady hero pose.

I went back on a separate day to photograph a helicopter hovering on the helipad at dawn, and the concrete helipad. We used an existing photo I had of a stormy gray sky as the background plate. All of these elements were brilliantly fused together into a believable final composite image by Craig Roberts and his team at Avenue Sixty7 in the UK. I love the foreground/background scale of the different subjects. We really wanted that look, with some of the subjects much closer to camera and Craig made it look great.

At the end of the project, our foundation client was pleased, the poster was a big hit, and we came away with an exceptional image that was the result of an entire team of people working together beautifully! (Larger version of the poster tearsheet here on my website).

Here’s the final shot without the graphics.

Panoramic Portrait Photography for ExxonMobil Annual Report

Cover of the ExxonMobil Summary Annual Report.

I’ve been really fortunate to work with ExxonMobil on their annual report photography and other corporate photography for the last ten years or so. It’s a great gig, and I’ve been able to document photographs of people and assets for their shareholders all over the world. I’m particularly proud of the work we did on this year’s version.

Cover of the ExxonMobil Financial and Operating Review.

Over that time, the books have been fairly consistent, with a vertical format layout, and often featuring traditional spreads of sprawling petrochemical complexes at dusk or at night. Although there’s always been quite a few people photos as well, this year was quite a departure in that the focus was completely on employee portraits. The marching orders were to create panoramic portraits of employees utilizing technology in their work environment. We’ve all seen the typical oil and gas photography, and it was fun to take it in a different direction and focus on the super smart people that make the company work.

Some spreads from the ExxonMobil Annual Report.

The format of the book was horizontal this time, to maximize the effect of the panoramic photos over a full two page horizontal format spread. The layouts were also adorned with quotes from the employees and helpful stats about the company. In the end, they used a mix of traditional environmental portraits, and some reportage working shots.

During our travels, we created most of the photographs with the 50 megapixel Canon EOS 5DS, and in several instances, we composited several frames to create the panos. We carried Profoto lighting, using the B-2 and the B-4 extensively. We also used some LED light panels on some of the photos. The cover shots and spreads I photographed were taken at sites in Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Belgium, and Angola.

It was a break from the usual approach honed over many years, and was both a challenge and an honor to work on. I ended up with both covers (Both the Summary Annual Report, and the F&O), and a number of spreads. Hoping to do some more great content for them in the future.

(Ed. note: although it says “2017 Annual Report”, it is actually released around May of the following year (2018) with figures from 2017, so it’s really not as old as it looks…).

More examples of our panoramic portraiture below:

Creating a football concussion Photo Illustration

I was commissioned recently to create an photo illustration for Houston Methodist Hospital Foundation’s Annual Report Photography for a story on concussions in high school football players. This is a big issue not just for the NFL, but also in youth sports.

I think that originally we were just going to shoot a simple portrait of a young athlete in football gear, but after giving some thought to the issue, the art director and I collaborated on a few other more illustrative ideas.

A few years ago, I had photographed Matt Schaub, the Houston Texans quarterback at the time for Methodist’s Leading Medicine publication. We did a couple of different versions: one was using a projected background created by a computer and an LCD projector of MRI brain scan imagery and another photo showing medical illustrations of nerve synapses in the brain.

I thought we might appropriate the brain projection idea, but add some other elements to it: a silhouette of a generic kid in a football helmet this time to keep the illustration anonymous; and a multiple exposure strobe effect to look like a violently shaking head. Our art director helped us in researching a suitable stock photo of the brain that we could use in the projector.

After doing some testing in the studio (do we need a white helmet or black helmet, for instance?), and ordering some props (youth sized football helmet, jersey, and shoulder pads) we booked a young male model for the shoot.

(If we were truly going to be literal here, the concept probably should have been a brain bouncing around with multiple exposures/blur INSIDE a sharper helmet image, but I quickly decided that would have just been a blurry mess and would not have been as easy of a read as the brain inside a shaking helmet.)

This is an early shot, showing the strobe on the background (gelled orange), the projected image on the helmet foreground, but without the multiple exposure/multiple strobe on the background effect.

The key was to tripod the camera for the “brain exposure”, keeping it absolutely still for this exposure provided by the projector, and then with the shutter open, firing multiple strobe bursts (with strobe lighting the background seamless only) with the model’s head in slightly different positions to show the silhouetted helmet with movement. Although I liked the randomness of the head movement in each photo, we finally settled on zooming the lens smoothly and evenly to create the multiple strobe head images.

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The intention was to do this just like the film days, creating the entire photo in camera, and we were successful with this for the most part. Some of the images admittedly had some “unintended brain movement” from the long exposure of the projector (I think it was around 1/4 to 1/8 of a second), so we ended up retouching a couple of the selections with a “sharper brain” from another exposure.

Changing the color of the gel on the background strobe created some cool multi-colored silhouettes during multiple pops of the flash. I think it’s especially interesting where the colors cross over and mix. Not a new idea, but fun to try nevertheless!

We used a Canon 5DS, and tried it with two different methods: leaving the shutter open and firing the Profoto strobe manually, and also with the multiple exposure feature engaged. We also tried two different methods to create head movement: having the model shake his head around during the multiple exposures; and also leaving the model still and zooming the lens during multiple exposures.

We even tried this with different gels on the background strobe, but in the end my favorite was a monochromatic look with just the brain projection in color.

Another example with different gels and changing the color balance.

I prefer this monochrome version with lots of exposures created by zooming the lens.

Guideposts cover shoot with Boston Marathon bombing survivor Rebekah Gregory

Rebekah Gregory, who was injured in the 2013 Boston Marathon explosion

I recently had an inspiring shoot with Boston Marathon bombing survivor Rebekah Gregory for Guideposts Magazine.

Gregory, then just 26, and her five year old son Noah were spectators standing only 3 feet away from the bombs near the finish line when the explosions went off on April 15, 2013 at the Boston Marathon. Her legs absorbed a lot of the bomb’s impact and shielded her son, likely saving his life.

Gregory and her son were both injured, and spent time apart in two different hospitals. After months of trying to rehabilitate and rebuild function in her injured leg, and scores of surgeries, she made the brave decision to amputate, and hasn’t looked back since.

A single mom at the time of the bombing, she’s since gotten married and had another child. She recently wrote a book, “Taking my Life Back: My Story of Faith, Determination, and Surviving the Boston Marathon Bombing,” with co author Anthony Flacco.

Rebekah Gregory, who was injured in the 2013 Boston Marathon explosion, photographed with her family at her home in Texas.

We photographed her at her home, and part of the mandate for the Guideposts cover was a powerful portrait of her on white seamless. Luckily, her home featured a garage with a giant ceiling, so we set up our “studio” in there. We used a Plume Wafer Hexoval 140 boomed into the center, directly over the camera for the white background stuff. We used three Profoto B-4 battery powered lights as our light source (and we later added an Acute 600 Air also). My good friend Misty Rockwell did a great job with makeup.

We did some “happy” smiling photos, but I really wanted her to look resilient, and was more drawn to those tough and strong poses. Although it didn’t make the cut, we created some really strong tight portraits with a classic fashion cover lighting setup of Rebekah in a cool gray workout fleece, and used a small, lower light source below the camera as well as the Hexoval over the camera to really make the eyes pop.

Rebekah Gregory, with her son Noah, who were both injured in the 2013 Boston Marathon explosion.

We also made some environmental portraits of her with her son in the driveway, and a family photo in the back with her husband and new baby, but my favorite shot might be her son hugging her on the white seamless, both of them with their eyes closed.

Rebekah is a class act who is using her platform as a survivor of this horrific event to promote and encourage others. You can’t spend time with her and not leave inspired to do better in your own life.

Rebekah Gregory, who was injured in the 2013 Boston Marathon explosion, photographed at her home in Texas.

Rebekah Gregory, with her son Noah who were both injured in the 2013 Boston Marathon explosion, at their home in Texas.

Robert Seale speaking at Asian American Journalists Association convention

I’ll be speaking at the 2018 Asian American Journalists Association annual convention at the Marriott Marquis, 1777 Walker St, Houston, Texas, Room 2734.

In addition to the regularly scheduled lineup of writers, editors and TV correspondents, longtime AAJA member Darrell Miho has organized an additional educational curriculum for still photographers over the three day convention. I’ll be doing a lighting talk from 11:00-12:30 Friday, August 10th.

Here’s the list of speakers and subjects for the still photo program:

Thursday, August 9

11:00am Lisa Krantz, San Antonio Express-News: Photo Stories

4:00pm Richard Tsong-Taatarii, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Images from the Rohingya Crisis

Friday, August 10

9:00am Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle : Baseball and sports photography

11:00am Robert Seale, Houston Commercial photographer: Lighting for Impact

2:00pm Laura Elizabeth Pohl, freelance photographer:A Long Separation. Families Divided by the Korean War

Saturday, August 11

3:00pm Chang W. Lee, New York Times:2018 Winter Olympics and Paralympics

4:30pm Portfolio Reviews/Photo Critiques

The Photo Hangouts are FREE to all AAJA18 attendees! If you’re not attending the convention and interested in just attending the Photo Hangouts please call or text Darrell Miho at 626.975.6349 or email us at aajaphoto@gmail.com

Chuck Norris put me in a headlock!

Actor and martial artist Chuck Norris on the family’s Lone Wolf Ranch in Navasota, Texas.

When the Boogeyman goes to sleep at night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.

There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to live.

Chuck Norris has counted to infinity – twice.

There is no chin behind Chuck Norris’ beard. There is only another fist.

I’ve loved reading these “Chuck Norris Facts” for years. It was pretty awesome when we actually got to meet the man in person recently when we photographed Norris and his lovely wife Gena for Houstonia magazine.

Actor and martial artist Chuck Norris and his wife, Gena Norris, have developed a new private-label bottled water manufacturing company called CForce Bottling Company on the family’s Lone Wolf Ranch in Navasota, Texas.

Part of the hook for the story was that Gena had recently fired up a full blown water bottling plant on their giant ranch property near Navasota to bottle water from the natural aquifer they found on their property. The plant is a state of the art facility and there is a charity component to their H2O endeavor. You can read more about it in the Houstonia story here.

Since we were there in sort of the middle of the afternoon on a sunlit partly cloudy day, we needed a big light and lots of power for the outdoor shots. We used a Profoto B-4 and a Plume Hexoval 180 for most of the outdoor shots.

Although we shot the bottling plant and did lots of still life shots of water bottles, the highlight for me was getting to make a cool environmental portrait of the former Walker Texas Ranger star and Gena on his awesome Texas ranch. We also shot in their horse stables, which had amazing light. Gena was a professional model, and the two of them together have a lifetime of experience in front of the camera and were just wonderful subjects to photograph. I don’t think I’ve ever dealt with two nicer, more accommodating people.

Actor and martial artist Chuck Norris in beautiful natural light in the horse stables on his Texas ranch.

Actor and martial artist Chuck Norris in the horse stables at his Texas ranch.

I couldn’t resist taking a romantic silhouette of Chuck Norris and his wife, Gena in the horse stable.

As we were loading the gear back into our vehicle, he came back out of the house and gave everyone in the crew a paperback copy of a Chuck Norris Facts book. I think he gets a big kick out of the cult hero status from all these “facts.”

Before we departed, Norris was telling us a story about going to Iraq to visit troops there. He was standing at the front of a long line of soldiers eager to meet him, shaking hands, posing for photos, signing autographs and such. When one of the soldiers (who was a particularly big strong guy) got to the front for his turn, the conversation went like this:

Soldier: “Ok, kick me in the chest!”

Chuck: “I’m not going to kick you in the chest…”

Soldier: “No, really, I want you to roundhouse kick me in the chest!”

Chuck: “Come on, I’m not going to kick you in the chest.”

The soldier wouldn’t let up, and was just dying to go back to the barracks and tell all his buddies that he survived a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick to the chest…..the line was starting to grumble from the delay.

Finally, Norris quickly grabbed the soldier, and in one quick motion the (at the time) 70 year old martial arts veteran spun him around backwards and put him in a choke hold and dropped the big guy to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

At this point all the other military guys standing in the autograph line, full grown men trained in combat, were yelling like little kids, “Put me in a choke hold too! Put me in a choke hold too!”

Of course….after hearing this story, what do you think I did?

“Put me in a choke hold! Put me in a choke hold!”

Here’s the layout of the article by (then) Houstonia art director Tanyia Johnson. She has an excellent eye for design, and I’m forever in her debt for sending me on such a cool assignment!

BuzzFeed photo shoot with Olympic Gymnast Simone Biles

With the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio coming up, I thought this might be a good time to write about a shoot we did earlier this year with US Olympic gymnast Simone Biles. Biles, who trains in Houston, is 4’9” tall and a three time world all around champion.

The media landscape is changing these days. This is the kind of shoot we might have done for Sports Illustrated once upon a time, but instead, this time we were commissioned by Buzzfeed to do this sports portrait shoot.

In the months leading up to the Olympics, the notable competitors (like Simone) have huge demands on their time. In addition to their normal training schedule, they are also doing interviews with various writers and television programs, and posing for photo shoots with not only media outlets, but potential endorsement partners. They are seriously busy, and it’s hard to stay focused on their training with all these various demands on their time.

To that end, we knew that we would have very little time to work with her, and that everything would need to be prepped carefully so as not to waste any of her time.

The photo editor wanted a classic, quiet portrait and sent several examples of gymnasts/fitness models on concrete walls and muslin backgrounds. Since Simone’s family-run training center was brand new and very modern, we knew we weren’t going to get the muted, moody industrial concrete wall background. We took a big muslin backdrop instead , and did a classic one-light portrait that stayed within the spirit of the comps.

We also prepped a secondary setup on a balance beam to capture some rim-lit “action” shots of Simone doing her thing. For this we used big tall C-stands with two Profoto B4’s and one Profoto 7B. (Note to self: always be careful when setting up lights in a gymnastics facility….one false step and you might find yourself neck-deep in a Nerf-cube-filled landing pit….not that this happened to me or anything….).

We mixed in some available light practice shots (I was able to dust off my usually dormant Canon EF 300/2.8!) of Simone and her coach working together to round out the assignment and give the photo editor lots of options.

The backdrop session went very fast…about 6-10 minutes. The balance beam shot went fast too, but not by choice. The coach shut us down after just a few frames saying the strobes were a distraction to the other young gymnasts training there. Even though we prepped them for what we were doing, you really can’t argue in that situation with the person controlling your access…..you just have to say yes ma’am and move on. I knew we had some nice frames already, ( thanks in large part to Simone’s perfect technique on the first few frames – thanks Simone!), so we pivoted and quickly moved on to available light practice shots.

The new family-run gym, World Champions Centre in Spring, Texas is an incredible facility. Simone’s parents and brother work together managing the facility and they do it with class and good humor. We were surrounded by a steady stream of youngsters training at various stations who I’m sure were hoping to someday be the next Simone. A “WARNING” sign near the lockers read, “CHILDREN LEFT UNATTENDED WILL BE SOLD TO THE CIRCUS.”

Buzzfeed recently ran an extensive story and collection of the photos here. I thought the story and presentation turned out great! Because of the virtually unlimited space they were able to run many more photos than you would typically see in a normal magazine layout. We in the newspaper/magazine journalism world have been talking about this advantage for years….it was nice to finally see a media outlet exploit the web format to full potential.

Photographing Tim Duncan – the greatest power forward of all time

Tim Duncan, photographed for the Sporting News on June 27, 1997. ©Robert Seale/The Sporting News

I covered Tim Duncan during countless games, including three San Antonio Spurs NBA Finals titles in 1999, 2003, and 2005. I probably took thousands of photos of him, but on the occasion of his quiet retirement, I picked a few out just for this blog.

I first met and photographed Tim Duncan on literally his first full day in San Antonio. He was drafted in Charlotte at the 1997 NBA Draft and flown to San Antonio, and then early in the morning of June 27, 1997 at Trinity University I photographed him for The Sporting News, my employer at the time. I had a crazy schedule back then, and had just flown back from Vancouver, and then been dispatched straight to San Antonio the night before for the Duncan portrait.

My Filofax page from June 1997. Things were busy at TSN back then!

There were three shooters there that day: the Spurs photographer (and all around classy guy) Clarke Evans, Patrick Murphy Racey, who (I think) was shooting for NBA photos at the time, and me. I think Clarke was the only one with an assistant, Patrick and I were there alone.

This “photo day scenario” was not an uncommon practice: you’re scheduled for a shoot with some big time pro athlete, and the team schedules several different media outlets for the same time frame. The athlete might be on set for half an hour, but each photographer gets 5-6 minutes on their own individual background , and you’re literally shooting a couple of feet away from the other photographers in the same room. I think Clarke and Patrick both had seamless setups, so I went outside on the balcony of the conference room we were in and set up my lights out there.

What I remember most is how quiet and childlike Tim was back then. He had a friend with him from college, and I remember them sitting together between the shots and chatting about nerdy guy stuff: knives, swords, or something. I could totally picture them playing Dungeons and Dragons. I wondered how many 20- sided-dice might fit in his gigantic hand. It was really innocent, and there was no ego or bravado. I remember none of us being able to force much of a smile out of him. He was completely uninterested in being a star – he just wanted to play….and I don’t think he ever changed in the next 19 years.

An overhead remote shot of Tim Duncan. © Robert Seale/The Sporting News

The best part of covering the Spurs during the NBA Finals was the camaraderie among fellow basketball photographers, all of whom travel together for weeks during the playoffs like a big traveling circus. Everyone works long hours, but after the gear gets put away, there were wonderful late night meals at Mi Tierra or drinks in the hotel hospitality suite with guys like Andy Hayt, John McDonough, Andy Bernstein, Bob Leverone, Andrew Loehman, Ronald Martinez, and a host of others.

Tim working his way out from under heavy Pistons coverage. © Robert Seale/The Sporting News

The worst part of covering the Spurs in the NBA finals (at least the first one in 1999…): hanging strobes and remotes in the ridiculously high catwalks of the God-forsaken Alamodome. The elevators only went to the middle mezzanine, and each pack/head/long lens/etc. had to be hoisted up with a rope from the top row of the nosebleeds. I used eight 2000 w/s Dynalite packs and heads, and about 750-1000 feet of zip line to connect the strobes for the playoffs there. (If they ever tear the building down, I might visit just to spit on the rubble).

Robert_Seale_Duncan-1 — A Sporting News cover of Tim Duncan from 1999. (Photo by Robert Seale)

Robert_Seale_Duncan-2 — Sporting News cover featuring The Admiral and Tim from 2003. (Photo by Robert Seale)

Robert_Seale_Duncan-10 — A cover from the Spurs 2005 NBA Finals championship. (Photo by Robert Seale)

After I left the Sporting News in late 2006, I had the good fortune to shoot Tim for a couple of covers while on assignment for Sports Illustrated. In 2013 I photographed him with his teammates Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker during a quick “studio” shoot in a parking garage. We had no more than 5 minutes to shoot the setup, and I had several lighting/background variations to run through. I had a little help, as Tim’s kids climbed all over me during the shoot….his son was hanging piggyback on me making faces, and his daughter was holding up “bunny ears” behind my head to try to get him to crack up. It was awesome!

A 2013 SI cover with the Spurs "Big Three." (Photo by Robert Seale) — A 2013 SI cover with the Spurs “Big Three.” (Photo by Robert Seale)

In 2015, we did another SI cover, this time for the NBA Preview issue. We had about 2 minutes with Tim and LaMarcus Aldridge. The concept (which SI carried through to several teams), was to have the newcomer to the team doing a signature move or pose of the team veteran. In Tim’s case, everyone knows he has a ritual in which the referee tosses him the ball, and he hugs it closely for several seconds before tossing it back to the ref for tip off. We managed to get LaMarcus to do the same move with Tim standing with him. There was no levity this time….just Tim with his usual deadpan expression, almost challenging you to try to take a “heroic” image of him.

A 2015 NBA Preview cover with Tim and Aldridge. (Photo by Robert Seale)

The shoot was quick, but I took Tim aside at the end and gave him a large print from that first shoot we did together, more than 18 years earlier.

“Wow, man….thanks.”, he said….and then he disappeared quietly.

Timmy performing his pre game ritual before tip off. © Robert Seale/The Sporting News

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