Sportrait

I'm not really sure when I first heard the term Sportrait. I think maybe Tommy Metthe, a college friend who shoots in TX, taught me the term. He's good at them, for sure. Here's the link to Tommy's blog..... http://tommysmodernlife.blogspot.com/ .

An obvious bit of short hand, Sportrait denotes a portrait made of an athlete. You do a lot of these at a newspaper.
Why all the sportraits? You have a lot of stories, and a lot of sports pages to fill, between games. And obsession of fans continues unabated between Fridays, at least in the case of high school football. We produce a lot of stories during the week to keep interest up, contextualize the upcoming slate of games, etc. Those stories often get illustrated by the Sportrait.
So here we have the roster of receivers for the Peach County Trojans. They are undefeated in the regular season and headed into the first round of playoffs this Friday. The request to get all six (!!!) of these receivers begged for, say it with me, the Sportrait.






For the gear heads, I shot this with a mix of natural light from the burning ball of hydrogen that fails to make bad light this time of year and two Nikon speedlights triggered remotely. They added some light to the guy fully in shadow and opened up the shadows on the down sun (is that a term?) sides of the other players' faces. Chris Deighan, the writer of the story, was kind enough to throw the ball over and over while my timing got sorted.

Cheers,
Grant B.