All Day, Every Day - Part 2 of 2

Once the Frozen Four ended, I had about three days to catch my breath, then headed out of town again. Since I can't seem to get enough of Arizona, I took another trip down there for a shoot with Qwest, this time featuring Tony Peña of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Since I have already been on a few of these shoots and know the drill, I was asked to be the photographer on this one and my colleague Brett was my assistant.

We arrived at the stadium at about 2pm on Wednesday the 16th for the initial walk through. Since we wanted some of the scenes to look as if they were shot at Tony's house, we took a look at a couple of different suites at the stadium to find the right one for the shoot.  The first one was fairly bland and didn't lend itself to looking like a living room.  It would have been very difficult to make it NOT look like it was a suite in a stadium.  So, we checked out another suite, directly beneath the first and WOW!  What a difference!  As you'll see from the pics below, it was exactly what we needed for the shoot!  Once we finished the walk through, we headed out for a drink and dinner at Kincaids, a steakhouse near our hotel.

Dinner at a steakhouse is always awesome, but it's even more awesome when it's paid for BY THE DIAMONDBACKS!  Apparently, there was a little misunderstanding/miscommunication when Qwest was reserving the spaces at the stadium for the shoot and it was the D-Backs fault, so they felt obligated to pay for our dinner!  Woohoo!  The conversation was great all night and the entire crew felt great about the shoot the next day, despite a couple of us being under the weather (I had a cold, Dave the art director was getting over one).

The shoot on Thursday went really well, despite a couple of unexpected miscues such as 1) Tony's english not being nearly as strong as the ad company thought/hoped and 2) him showing up in mesh shorts, when we needed him in jeans.  The result of this second little mishap was that we basically threw out the plan for the first half of the shoot up in the suite.  We had a couple people run to get him some jeans which took about an hour.  Now, I've been on enough of these shoots, large and small, to know that just about every time you can pretty much count on tossing what you deem to be vital parts of the plan of attack.  You just have to wing it and make it look good.  The one benefit of these experiences is that you get good at thinking on your feet and can react quickly to little fires and other unexpected hurdles.

Anyway, we finished the stuff up in the suite and broke for lunch, then had Tony put on a uniform so we could get some action photos of him and some other stuff down on the field and in the dugout.

One of the lighting techniques that I have learned while going on these shoots is using large reflectors to capture nicely lit action photos of the athletes we shoot.  By using ambient light, modified with reflectors (Yes, I'm about to photo-geek out on you) we're able to keep our shutter speeds high, thus stopping the action.  At the same time, the reflectors provide a nice accent to the standard action photo, in this case adding some nice fill light under Tony's hat in the pitching photo below.  I've also included a photo of the video guys and Brett aiming their reflectors at Tony so you can see how we're making some of these photos.  Without the light under his hat, his face would be in the shadows from the brim of his hat and you wouldn't be able to see very many of his facial features.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the pics.  They're not the most exciting pics by any means, but I think they're technically done very well and Brett and I put together a nice group of images for our client.

Next up, the Mt. West Men's Golf Championship in....YOU GUESSED IT!.....ARIZONA!!!

Enjoy the pics!

-TSB2

You should have seen the first suite we looked at for the shoot.  Compared to this, it was horrible!

The nice thing about this was that we actually had a live phone and he was able to call some friends.  So we got some pretty genuine smiles from him.  I wonder what they talked about...it was all in Spanish, so I didn't understand a lick of it.  He probably said something like 'These suits are paying me so much cash to just sit here and smile while I talk to you!  How sweet is that?'

Okay, so here is the pitching photo.  Take a look at the nice light on his face...

Here's how we got that nice light under his face.  That's Brett on the left with the big white reflector...

I told Brett I was disappointed he didn't have some grapes to feed him...

This was the last scene we shot in the dugout...I was so happy to be shooting this since it meant we were done.  It was a great shoot, but it was definitely long.