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.