Experimentation pays off…

Alright this may not be a new technique, but it was something I wanted to try to do.  On July 7 I received probably the most fun assignment I have been given all summer.  The assignment was to photograph Samantha Mahoney, a Kentucky basketball player, who has spent the last month or so training like a boxer.  Her goal is to be a tougher basketball player by becoming accustomed to getting knocked around.  Anyway I shot the normal assignment stuff (which turned up some nice frames too) while Mahoney trained with her coach.  While I was shooting that stuff I noticed through the view finder that the sun was really strong through the bank of windows on the front wall.  I have seen this technique before but wasn’t sure of how it was done.

Mahoney finished up and I kind of thought I was done, but now it was reporter Jen Smith’s turn to work.  For some reason I decided to hang out.  Jen was done interviewing Mahoney and began interviewing her coach.  I noticed that Mahoney was sitting over by the ring just hanging out as well.  So I wondered if she would let me experiment a little and went over and asked her if she wanted to try something with me.  I wouldn’t say she was exactly eager but she agreed.  I told her I had an idea I wanted to try following Ron Garrison’s lighting class I had taken last semester and she seemed to be a little more interested ( I think she said "There’s a whole class about lighting?").  Anyway, I asked her to sit in front of the large window and started "testing" the digital way.  After a few frames I chimped and made a few adjustments.  So I began overexposing in order to blow out the background detail (which was a really lame parking lot).  Once I got it to where I wanted I then started working on a the composition and liked the feel of this one.

I may not have executed it 100% correctly but the result was close to the picture I had in my head, which is what I want to work on.  I want to try the technique again correcting what I think I did wrong and hopefully my future experiments will work out.

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