Tennis: Megan

Now that the weather has started to change in the Pacific Northwest I’ve been trying to take advantage of as many not rainy days as possible. In all honesty, I’m more than happy to shoot on a cloudy day because it provides a perfect backdrop for some of my more edgy photographs. The biggest problem is when rain shows up unannounced and I have my all my lights set up. So, I spend most of my time checking and rechecking the weather to make sure my gear is going to stay dry.

Tennis has quickly become one of my favorite sports to play and watch and it’s been something that I’ve wanted to photograph for a while. In any of my Sportraits, I try to work with people who have a lot of experience in the sport rather than having someone try to fake it. I want their to be an aspect of authenticity in all of my photographs.

When I came across Megan’s portfolio I felt like she would be a perfect subject for the shoot. She’s been playing for quite some time and we were able to talk a little bit about some of the recent Tennis matches (which is always nice to have an easy way to break down the photographer model barriers). When you shoot with an athlete it becomes a collaborative effort between the two of you to create something authentic but at the same time photographs well. Whenever I’m on set, I always bounce ideas of the subject to see what they think and see if they have any opinions. Some of my most favorite photos that I have taken were a direct result of me having a dialogue with the subject on location and creating something together rather than sticking to only your ideas.

My favorite photo of the set is the last and I think it’s because of the work that had went into it. I had already planned going into the shoot that I wanted to get an elevated look to some of the shots. In order to do this, I had to climb the fence and sit on top which proved to be much more difficult than planned. I’ll spare you the details but I will tell you it wasn’t the most comfortable position to shoot in. In my mind though, if that’s what it takes to get the image that I want then I am more than willing to climb up on a 12ft fence and shoot some photos.

I’m sure there will be some interest in a Breaking Down the Image but I haven’t put anything together yet. In fact, I would be interested in hearing which one of the photos you would like me to dig deeper on. I’ve also been bringing an assistant along on some of my recent shoots so I’m hoping that I will start having her shoot some behind the scenes images so you can see exactly how everything is set up.

More photos soon!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 28th, 2011 at 8:55 AM. It is filed under Blog and tagged with Photos, Sportrait, Tennis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.