80 Percent Mental

Concept: It’s often said sports are 80 Percent Mental (I think the exact percentage fluctuates) and I always felt like that would be an interesting photo project. The idea is to capture various athletes competing against themselves and depict the mental battles each and every athlete deals with.

Initially, I didn’t plan on publishing any of the images until the project was finished. My hopes were to spend this summer photographing 10 to 20 different subjects in all different athletic arenas and then publish the entire series at once. However, with limited resources and some timing issues, I decided it might be an open ended project. Thus, I felt it was only right to publish this photo or else I’m not sure how long it would be before I any of you would see this image.

To maintain consistency throughout the photo, the lights and camera maintain the same position and different frames were captured of the subject. Normally, when working on a portrait I try to keep the lighting very symmetrical about the subject. But, in this case it’s symmetrical about the court… not the subject. When I shot Michael dribbling the ball he was actually much closer to the right rim light than he is to the left rim light (that is camera left and right not subject left and right). I feel like this makes the composite look more consistent and natural because the only thing that is changing is the subject position. The camera stays constant (and thus the background stays constant) and the lighting about the location stays constant.

In post, I decided that I needed to make the subject a little bit more opposite by changing the color of the shirts (lightening the right and darkening the left) as well as changing the shoe colors. The idea behind this was to create opposing figures rather than making it look like mirror images (minus the basketball). The basket was also added in post to give it more of a basketball feel rather than just some random setting.

I have concepts put together for a couple of other sports but would love to hear some of your suggestions on what you would like to see. What sports would you like to see captured?

I’m currently in the process of planning and capturing the second image in the series. Initially, as I said above, I was hoping to capture 10-20 images over the summer. But, I decided that doing these photos quickly wouldn’t be doing the project justice. I want to create elaborate composites sometimes containing more than 10 different photos of a subject competing in the chosen sport. I’m not even positive this image will appear in the final series. However, for now it’s a good starting point to build upon.

Since I have connections with a lot of track and field athletes that will most likely be the next sport in the series. If there is any sport where it’s truly you vs yourself, it’s track. It may be difficult to get this shot in with the current weather conditions but I’m definitely going to try to get it done as soon as possible. Looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 7th, 2011 at 8:28 AM. It is filed under Blog and tagged with 80 Percent Mental, Basketball, Sportraits, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.