In The Field: Baseball Portraits With The Hamilton A’s
It was late winter.
I hadn’t really shot anything of note – except for some concert stuff – in a while.
And I really hadn’t done any planned portraiture in a really long time.
I was getting edgy to create something…so I started planning.
For the last couple of seasons, I had wanted to do portraits of my son, Matt’s Hamilton A’s baseball team.
Because this is his travel team, they don’t set up a “picture day” like the the Rec League does. Maybe because I love the light in their dugouts in the evenings.
But, we (me and the Coach) were never able to get it together.
Then, in February, I started to see these Instagram posts from photographers doing photo days with Major League Baseball players at Spring Training…like Kelly in South Florida, and Daniel Shirey and Scott Paulus and also the athlete portraits my friend, Saed Hindash, shoots.
I started to think of cool portraits with the Hamilton A’s team, using some inexpensive, simple Neewer battery power 160 LED panel lights and green and yellow gel sheets…their team colors…that I taped to the light panels.
Since it was February, and still too cold for them to be on the field, they were doing indoor practices in this converted warehouse. As you walk it, there’s all this exposed brick and really high ceilings with fluorescent lights. And pigeons flying around.
Honestly, I’ve been looking for an excuse to shoot in this space for a long time – all the metal and exposed brick looks really cool. There’s also a roll-down door that I used for a background too (that first pic of Matt).
For the metal door photos, I was using a Neewer 16″ Beauty dish on a Neewer Vision 4 strobe. It was set to the lowers power and I really liked the look it was giving me.
This team is a really good bunch of boys, tough to make them look, well, touch. But I didn’t want smiles from them and followed the art direction well.
And, while I had plain gray backdrop with me, I opted instead to use the exposed brick – which is painted white – as the background for the portraits using the green and yellow gels. Not sure how the gels would have looked on with metal door, but I didn’t want to keep switching set-ups, so beauty dish one, light panels on the other.
This one, of David, is one of my favorites of the set that I shot. Feels like this was exactly the lighting balance I was going for, plus you can still see the eyes.
BTS
The set-ups were really simple, I had each boy for about 5 minutes – practice was going on so I didn’t want to keep them too long. I shot this on a Sunday and what was great was that me, Chase and Matt went to the facility on Saturday for me to do some tests. It was chilly and pouring down rain when we went, but the scouting helped me figure out what I wanted to do before we even go there (Chase was my assistant for the shoot, while Matt was practicing. He also shot the BTS photos.)
Actually, there was another spot in this area where I wanted to shoot the boys – near these long plastic curtain doors. But, in the heat of the shoot, I totally forgot to do a third set-up, even though I had written it down. Looked like it could work well. Lesson learned: Always look at your notes, kids!
Could have been a cool option.
Another test shot the day before
To further achieve the look I wanted, I did use the Nik Analog Filter set in my post-processing. There is one called “Color Cast” that gave the me the tones I really wanted.
To put a cap on this….I made prints of the boys to give to the parents….and I gave them out last night at practice. While the boys liked them….the parents really liked them. It was fun to hand over 11×14 prints for them to enjoy. I used MPix Photo Lab to do the printing this time around, and they looked amazing.
And here’s a quick video I shot after I laid them out on the bleachers.
The Neewer equipment I used was great, and the Canon 5DMIV did all the heavy lifting. I had a whole other set of things I wanted to do…green eye paint. LED lights on the bats…but in the end, maybe simpler was better. I can tuck those ideas away for another project.
Let me know what you think in the comments!
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