Christmas in October
Editorial
Pekin-East Peoria football
Cross country sportrait
My second assignment of the evening was to photograph a local cross country runner for an upcoming feature. I’ve shot a few sportraits in my day, but never one of a runner. One of the main challenges was location. I met her and the reporter at the high school and while she was doing a short interview, I scouted a few shots within walking distance of the main entrance of the school. If this had been a track runner, I would have been automatically drawn to the school’s track, but cross country presents a bigger challenge for the background. The school is near a busy highway so I settled on a running shot next to the school’s brick exterior for the sake of a clean background. Ideally, I would have liked to have an open field or a forest to shoot in, but this was the best background I could find on the fly. I had her run towards a Nikon SB-800 (1/8 power, zoomed to 24 mm) while I added a bit of fill with a Nikon SB-600 at a 45 degree behind her (1/4 power, zoomed to 24 mm). I had a sort of sweet spot between the lights, and it took a few passes for me to catch her in the lights.
Homes portrait
It’s been a while since I’ve shot a lit portrait. In Austin, I seemed to shoot quite a bit of them of local musicians, but today was the only the second time I had pulled my speedlights out of the bag since I started here about two months ago. My first assignment was to photograph a local home for an upcoming story previewing the Opera Illinois Yule Walk tour of homes. For the interior shots, I went 100-percent ambient because the house had large windows that created a very interesting ambiance in the home. I did pull the lights out of the trunk for portraits of the owners in order to throw a little more light on their faces. Here are couple of my favorites:
Harvest
After the wedding this weekend, I’m back in the swing of things today after driving back to Peoria from Indiana at 7:45 a.m. this morning. When I got to work, my boss asked me to shoot something to go with an upcoming business story about the harvest. It was kind of an open-ended assignment where I could shoot something related. I talked to the reporter who pointed me towards an area northwest of town where one of his contacts was combining corn. I headed out and eventually found the group working a 70-acre field. The guys were pretty nice and allowed me to ride in the combine for a few passes through the field. I’ve never ridden in combine before so it was an interesting experience. I was kind of surprised how high tech the inside of the combine is with GPS and yield monitoring screens.
