TRE Women – Exercise in Dirty Light

The Team Rogue Elite women are an awesome bunch who make sacrifices to careers, family and friends everyday to chase the dream of becoming an Olympic Athlete. I support them with my photography. If you are interested, you can visit their website to support them as well.

The gals from TRE have needed updated marketing and promotional material, and we finally had time in all of our schedules to get together at Pure Austin Quarry Lake. The theme was tough, hard working runners who support each other through a team atmosphere. That meant group type workouts, suffering together, supporting each other, and rocking their Adidas gear.

For those interested in how and why I light my subjects, the next paragraph will be interesting. For the rest, just sit back and check out the photos.

In talking to the stylist on the team, Sarah, we decided to go for an edgy, hard, no soft anywhere Dirty Light. The gals didn’t want pretty. No big softboxes, or socked beauty dishes for nice even light. No we went hard and zoomed small flashes. Part of that too is that the gym was open while we were shooting and I didn’t want to cause a saftey hazard. My Dirty light setup is usually just three speedlight on lightstands. We place them around the perimeter of the shooting area, at about equal power, in this case around 1/4 power. At 1/4 I get decent recycling inside my zone of light. I also get to move around and photograph the set without stopping to check light output or 1/10s of f-stops like we would in studio. We use this type of setup on race courses as well for the edge and fill needed.

For the photograph at the top of the page, I knew I needed a little more depth of field than the f4 I was shooting for isolation shots. We went to f8 to pull focus across all six women, but instead of raising the power of the lights we just brought them in real close. There are two speedlights to the left and one behind for separation.

All of the photos were processed in the new Lightroom 4 Beta, and then taken into Photoshop for my new favorite plug-in, Nik’s Viveza 2. Viveza works great for me because of its simplicity of design and effectiveness. Before LR4 had the white balance brush, Viveza gives me the ability to control white balance in different areas of the photo, and the “structure” brush gives me very cool detail/sharpening. Hit me up in the comments if you have more post-processing questions.

Thanks again to Pure Austin for supporting Team Rogue Elite and allowing us a venue to photograph.
Thanks to adidas for their support and cool threads

–JB

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 at 4:30 AM. It is filed under Sports and tagged with adidas, dirty light, pure austin, quarry, team rogue elite, women, workout. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.