recreating a masterpiece…power rangers style

This last weekend I shot volleyball players from UCI, Argentina, Netherlands and Korea. I was trying to replicate this Power Rangers poster below:

I shot it in one of the gyms with all the lights out. It was big enough of a room so that the light would not spill out far enough to hit any walls. I knew that I would need a relatively soft light to light the main part of the players faces. For the main soft light I angled it so that the light would fall off on the face and fade to black. Then I used an additional light more to the left of the camera and set to a higher power, to give more of an outline on the edge of the face.

I shot each player individually and then merged the photos later in photoshop. One thing I did not intend to have was the shadow cast on the players faces from the nose. It was from the more powerful light that I used to outline the players from the side. Hopefully I can learn of a better angle to place that light in order to cut down on that specific shadow.

Below is a group shot that I took with one player from each team together. I needed to take a back-up photo just in case the other photos didn’t turn out as planned.

I had a lot of fun just messing with the lighting on this shoot. It was pretty simple but it showed fundamental ways to manipulate light.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 11:40 pm. It is filed under Bren Events Center, D3, Irvine, NCAA, New University, Nikon, Pocketwizard, Portraits, Sportrait, Sports, UCI, Volleyball and tagged with Argentina, Canada, interenational volleyball, Ivrine, Korea, Netherlands, Portrait, UCI, Volleyball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.