More High School Sports - Team Posters - 2011

Here are the latest two (soccer) team posters for the 2011 season.  I have cropped or removed the player names, schedules, slogans, sponsors, etc.  This year I have changed the way I shoot these to get better resolution in the final product.  For most of the posters this year I took multiple shots and composited them into the final shot.  Not only do the players look better and have far more detail, but it allowed going to a larger (wider really) format.

For the women’s poster I was going for a generic setting.  I am not a fan of putting them on old cars or dressing them up in costumes as I have mentioned before.  I also wanted the girls to look strong, but still cute.  A local video production company graciously allowed us to use part of their huge production studio for our shot.  The seamless white setup was nearly identical to Zack Arias’ White Seamless setup. I went out to the studio the day before to set up and steam the muslin background.  This helped keep the setup for the day of the shoot more manageable.  One of the dads had to transport my two sheets of “Thrifty White Tileboard (which is now $12.97 a sheet) for me though as I was afraid the wheels on my utility trailer would go flying off at 75 mph on the way out to the studio.  My deviations from Zack’s setup where that 1) I don’t have full-length V-flats, instead I clamped smaller flags to stands adjacent to the background lights, and 2) I went back to my new favorite lighting setup using three lights on the players instead of just a front key light.

For the men’s poster I really prefer to have a sports setting and the guys are always up for anything I throw at them.  The coach and I scouted locations a few weeks before and one of the locker rooms was exactly what I was looking for to get the sports theme involved.  While I wanted to keep the same lighting theme going that had been used for the football and other soccer poster, a few additional lights were needed.  In this case one more key light and one fill light were added.

Once again, these kids were so much fun to work with.  I usually provide the team representative with an overhead of how I plan to arrange the players and ask them for help determining which players are which in my diagram.  It is great for making sure we don't have to move players around after the shots are completed.  As much pre-planning as you can do always pays off as 20 teenage athletes don't like standing around for hours and typically they need to get to practice as soon as possible.
No expensive video cameras were harmed during production and no moms were embarrassed by unexpected athletes flying out of the showers – you can help avoid that by beginning the shoot at 6:30 am though!The difference between guys and gals - girls are very concerned about how they individually look, especially their hair and guys want the whole poster to look super cool. We are booked for next year already which is nice so I have time to come up with new ideas.