UO Acrobatics and Tumbling

I was commissioned by the University of Oregon’s Athletic Department to shoot the poster for their Acrobatics and Tumbling team for the upcoming season. Sometimes it’s difficult going into a project with no clear instruction of exactly what they want you to photograph. The only request was that I make the girls look badass (literally the wording) and felt that I would be a perfect fit for the project. I did my research and came up with a few ideas based upon some of their stunts that I felt would translate into a good photograph.

Some of the difficulties were that I didn’t have much time to set up and there wasn’t really a set number of people that I would be working with. Essentially I was able to get in at the exact same time as the girls and had to get set up and ready to shoot (and come up with a final concept). I stuck to my traditional three light setup but over the past few times I’ve gone away from using softboxes as my rim lights and have replaced them with 30 degree gridded reflectors (partially in this case because gridded reflectors are quicker to set up than softboxes).

The final image took about 8 hours of post-processing which involved individually editing each pair of girls and then cutting them and making them seamlessly fit into the background. Also, I had to try to match the background to the girls to the best of my ability. Later this week I’ll post step by step images from the start to the finish of the composite which should give you a better idea of how I got to the final image. For now though, here’s the final image that will be used for their poster this year:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 at 9:00 AM. It is filed under Blog and tagged with Composite, Sportrait, University of Oregon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.