In short, this was my fastest shoot ever. 5 minutes to get the shot before Bubba
had to run off and play the Houston Open tournament. What do you do when you only
have 5 minutes? You better be prepared, and you better be quick.

In addition to the time challenge came the time of day and light challenge. Everybody
can make great looking shadows and photos around the golden hour. Unfortunately it
doesn’t always work out that way. In this case we shot at noon. Texas sun at noon is
brutal and we had to come up with a solution. I don’t like the shadows on the ground a
scrim produces, so that was not an option. What do you do when you have to compete
with the sun? You bring more power :).
My assistant Kevin and I arrived at 10 in the morning to start to scout the location.
Due to the tournament going on at the main course, we had the second golf course for us.
We drove around and found the right spot and started to set up immediately. Here’s a
quick drawing of my idea for the light setup:

(I know I should not quit my day job to become anything that requires drawing)

Basically we had to overpower the sun in oder to avoid the nasty shadows it would’ve
produced at noon being high above. So we placed a large 45″ octo-box with my trust
Zeus pack to camera right a little above. Two more heads were directly from each side
of the subject with the ProFoto Magnum reflector powered by a Pro 7b. Here’s a photo of the
actual setup:

I shot this one on the Canon 5D II tethered to the Macbook Pro that you can also see in the
photo. The Macbook is also connected to two external FW800 drives which are configured as
RAID1 so that already on location we would have three copies of each file. Yes, I’m paranoid!
Camera settings were 1/200th and between f16 and f22 using the 24-70 lens.

The key here was that we started to set up early, got the testing done (using Kevin as
stand in) and were ready when Bubba arrived on set. All your gear does nothing good if
you’re not ready, so always prepare when shooting somebody who doesn’t have much time.
This is not the time to try out new setups, the new fancy camera you just got or the
unknown software, unless you have time and get the shot early.
Another thing to keep in mind when shooting pro-athletes is dealing not only with them
but also with their managers who try to make sure you pose your subject right so that
all the sponsor logos look great. That’s were your people skills come into play to navigate
that mine field :).

I seem to have this pattern of shooting people in the wide open at noon :).
Big octo-box on camera right from above and two 20″ grids from the back on each
side approx. at 45 degree angle.