I have been nominated for an Ontario Newspaper Award (ONA) in the portrait category for this photo of Dany Heatley, a forward for the Ottawa Senators, so I thought I would break down how it was made.
We needed a photo to run on the front of the Ottawa Sun for the first day of the NHL’s regular season and I was given a weeks notice to run through the rolodex in my head and come up with a couple ideas. We have taken lots of portraits of the top three forwards on the Senators (Heatley, Daniel Alfredsson and Jason Spezza), so I wanted to come up with something that our readers and my editors haven’t seen before. I started poking around my favorite sports photographers websites (Donald Miralle, Robert Seale, Peter Read Miller, Al Bello…) to see if I could put a few elements together. I quickly came to realize how little the NHL must matter in the grand scheme of things as none of them had any hockey pictures on their websites. I noticed that on both Donald and Robert’s websites that they had portraits of an athlete showing the range of motion of their swings and since Donald quickly explained how these images are made while he was speaking at a WCNPA Photojournalism conference, I knew that I had something to work from. While being great images, I thought they looked static and a bit posed. I really wanted to make something that looked more 3-dimensional and engaged the reader.
This shot took three days to complete. One day to get all the permissions and approvals I needed, one day to set it up and test the idea, the other day to sit around until Dany was able to give us 20 minutes. Chris Pike assisted me with this shoot.
The Set-up This shot was set-up in a unused press conference room at Scotiabank Place. The background was an 18′ wide black seamless paper backdrop taped to a wall with a few feet that ran down the carpet for him to stand on.
Three flashes were used: L1) A flash to the subjects left on half power zoomed out to 85 mm and pointing at his face. L2) A flash clamped to the same stand as L1 and pointing at the subjects legs probably zoomed out to 85 mm as well. L3) A flash to the subjects right at full power hitting him from slightly behind to separate him from the backdrop zoomed to 70 mm. I used a Canon 1D Mark2n and a 16-35mm f2.8 lens with the camera on a tripod. I wish I could have used a longer lens, but we didn’t have enough room. The flashes were rigged with Pocket Wizards.
The Electric Hockey Stick (EHS) One of Heatley’s sticks had rope-lights taped on both sides of it and had them plugged into an extension cord so when he swung the stick it didn’t rip the plug out of the wall.
The Exposure The room was completely black. I shot at ISO 100, f16 and had a 16 second exposure (bulb). Click. Dany would take a few swings, nice and slowly, with the EHS creating the light trails. In the dark, Chris would then take the stick, unplug it and hand Dany his normal stick. On my count Dany would mimic a “one-timer” towards the camera and I would trigger the flashes remotely (with a Pocket Wizard) once he was in his finished position. Click.
Dany wasn’t really sure what it was we were trying to accomplish, but after seeing some of the test shots he got the idea. Originally we were planning on having him take a slap shot, but he kept losing his balance in the final position and his arm would sometimes block his face. We switched to the one-timer at the last minute and only took four frames this way. The last frame was the frame. I made a print for Dany and have an autographed print in my hall.
17|12 |