Canon EOS-5D Mark II, EF 85mm f 1.2L. 1/200 sec. at f8.

I’d just landed at the airport in Austin, on my way back from shooting a portrait of Oklahoma quarterback Sam Bradford for, of all things, Golf World magazine, when my phone buzzed with a text from John Bianco, the Sports Information Director for Texas’ football program. The gist of it was this: Texas was anticipating a high level of media demand for Colt McCoy during the season, and they wanted to take a day to make him available for portraits before the season started and he needed to concentrate on playing football. Since I was Sports Illustrated’s guy in Austin (or so he reasoned), did I think S.I. would be interested in getting a few minutes with Colt on Wednesday morning?

I tried to remember what day it was. Oh yeah. Monday.

I drove home and e-mailed S.I. picture editor Claire Bourgeois, who was handling all things football before her beloved hockey season started, and told her about the text. We’d be crazy to turn down the opportunity, she reasoned, confident that there would be something in the coming months that would necessitate our having the pictures in and ready to go. She pointed to a similar shoot she and I had collaborated on with Vince Young at Texas a few years earlier, which resulted in a multitude of uses for the magazine even though we went into it unsure of what we needed or wanted from it.

Portraits of Vince Young shot in 2005. Even without a story at the time of the shoot, each of these has run as an opener to illustrate four separate stories in various issues of S.I.

Just as with the Young shoot, since there was no real “hook” to it, I wanted to give the magazine a bunch of different things to choose from. And with McCoy’s Heisman Trophy chances (and therefore the potential late-season demands on his time) at an all-time high, I wanted to ensure that we had taken care of a bunch of potential scenarios–for example, use in an in-season feature, in a Heisman-winning story, and perhaps in a year-end commemorative issue. I decided that it wasn’t out of the question to get three distinct shots done, if I played my cards right.

On the other hand, it had the potential to be a busy day for him and I was anticipating limited shooting time.  I’m also a firm believer in not wasting my subjects’ time. Especially here; I live in Austin, I cover the Longhorns regularly, and I have a good working relationship with the Sports Information staff. I like to think that’s partly due to the fact that they know, based on years of working with me, that when I show up for a shoot I come prepared, work within a schedule–usually theirs– and do whatever I can to stick to it so as not to waste their time or that of their athletes.

So anyway, back to the three shots and playing my cards right. Doing that starts with finding an assistant who knows what he or she is doing, and I was lucky in that Andrew Loehman, Austin-based assistant extraordinaire, was available. He and I have worked together a lot over the years, and it’s reassuring to have someone as good at anticipating and executing on the set when it’s crunch time. Knowing that I was going to be working with a very competent assistant then allowed me to plan the shoot out with that in mind, and know exactly how to effectively budget my shoot time.

Uber-assistant Andrew Loehman on the set in the visitor's locker room at Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. The black background for shot 2 is at right; the lockers for shot 3 are behind me. Note the black foil-wrapped flourescent fixtures at the top.

For the three shots, I decided on a full-body, seated, more formal portrait, a rather tight headshot with a black background and, based on Claire’s request, something more environmental involving lockers and/or a wider locker room picture. I’d never been in the visitor’s locker room before, so I’d be winging it–but adapting to a location is something I like to think I’m pretty good at, so I wasn’t too worried. From there, it was just a matter of sketching out in my head how I wanted each shot to look in terms of mood and lighting, and then to figure out a way to position the sets and the lights to be able to shift between them as quickly and effortlessly as we could.

The seated shot would be the most complicated; for starters it would be strobed, and the remaining two shots would be made with ambient light (more on that later). Additionally, the background was huge–a 20×30-foot gray muslin from Gear Rentals in Austin that would take a lot of room–not to mention patience–to set up. So I decided to set that as the first shot.

After getting the background into place, I worked on camera position. I wanted to try a few shots on 4×5 if I had time (yes, just for the hell of it), and since the camera had to be fixed for that, we started there. Andrew and I positioned full- and half- apple boxes at the appropriate spot in the 4×5 frame, and Andrew sat in as I looked on the ground glass, shifting him into exactly the right spot. Once established, we could set the lights.

The main light for the shot came from camera left, a Profoto Acute head in a silver beauty dish with a 40-degree grid. This would be aimed directly at McCoy’s face. While I love the hard, specular quality of the light from this modifier, the falloff is distinct and immediate, rendering the remainder of the set (and the lower half of the body) indistinguishably dark. While I wanted to emphasize his face and the burnt-orange jersey, I still needed to have some detail in the rest of the frame. To solve the problem I placed another acute head in an 8-foot Elinchrom Octabank directly behind the main light, and dialed it down to a two-stop difference from the main light. This provided just enough detail in the shadows while retaining the lighting emphasis on the face and jersey. It also meant that the background was lit just enough to go to dark, brownish gray rather than black. Nevertheless, we hid another Acute head, with a 10-degree grid and aimed at the backdrop, behind the apple boxes and disguised the head cable inside the natural folds in the backdrop. This provided a bit of separation between subject and background. After shooting a few Polaroids (both digital and the real thing), we added a bit of white cloth as a reflector to camera right to open up the shadows on McCoy’s face a bit.

Canon EOS-5D Mark II, EF 85mm f 1.2L. 1/40 sec. at f2.

From there we would move on to the tight portrait. I wanted a very shallow depth of field for this, to emphasize both his eyes and the Longhorn-logo eye black tape that he wears during games. To achieve this, I’ll use my favorite portrait lens, a Canon EF 85mm f1.2L, and shoot it almost wide open. To the right of the first set, we set up an eight-foot square black duveteen backdrop, at a slight angle off of perpendicular. This was in keeping with my desire to maximize our efficiency. Now, after we finished the first shot, all Colt had to do was turn about 70 degrees to his right while I walked around the Octabank (so that it, my new main light, was now camera right), set my white balance to tungsten and bumped my ISO up to 400. Andrew simultaneously shut down the beauty dish and background accent light, and turned on the modeling light on another head which we’d pre-positoned and snooted to light his hair. Using the modeling lights only, I took care of shot number two. The whole shift from one set to another took about 10 seconds, plus another 20 to get the eye black on.

About halfway through this shoot, though, I noticed something interesting–one of those things you don’t really plan for but just seems to work out nicely. I asked Andrew to rummage through my case and grab a 12mm extension tube–extension tubes are something I started carrying regularly a few years ago when golf assignments began calling for quick detail shots of equipment; now they’re something that sit in the bag most of the time but when I need them I’m glad they’re there. This was one of those times. After shooting a bunch of frames to ensure there was something sharp (hair’s-breadth depth of field and a 1/30 second shutter speed are never a combination to inspire confidence), it was time to take care of the last shot.

The "grab shot." Canon EOS-5D Mark II, EF 85mm f 1.2L, 12mm extension tube. 1/30 sec. at f2.

Canon EOS-5D Mark II, EF 85mm f 1.2L. 1/60 sec. at f2.

Since I’d never seen the room, the wild card was the locker shot, and it was with a great deal of anticipation that I walked into the room in the morning. I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised. It was old-school, with gray mesh lockers large enough to sit inside, set in rows long enough to provide some perspective and depth. And better yet, a row of lockers could be positioned directly behind the Octabank light position for the first and second shots, meaning that essentially all McCoy had to do was get up, walk 5 feet to a new position in one of the lockers while Andrew spun the light 180 degrees. It was slightly more complicated than that–in the pre-shot tests we determined the shadow would be a little harsh, so we had to improvise a way of hiding some gold reflective fabric inside the lockers for a bit of fill, and we set some props in specific locations for a little depth in the frame, but on the whole it was pretty simple.

There was one problem with the available light approach used for the last two shots, however: nobody could figure out how to turn off the lights in “my” portion the locker room. Switches were nowhere to be found (trust me, we looked); the maintenance guys insisted it could be done but it would have to be done remotely and involve not only a huge amount of time and effort, but also turning off all the lights in the room–not an option with two other photographers working in the room. But to leave the lights on meant contaminating the tungsten modeling lights with the awful green of flourescents. Thank God for black-wrap, and lots of it. I like to travel somewhat light–I bring a ton of gear but I’m not the kind of guy who travels with a grip truck–but I always have two full rolls of the stuff buried into one of my light stand bags, and we used every square inch of it to cover whatever was affecting our frame.

Linhof Master Technika, Schneider APO-Symmar 210mm f5.6, Kodak Portra 160-NC film. 1/400 f 11.

Other than that, it all went off without a hitch. Just that little bit of troubleshooting, while a rather large pain in the ass at the time, turned out to be well worth it in the finished product. Given the choice I’ll always take the more organic look and feel of controlled ambient light over strobe for my portraits, what with the shallower depth of field, more natural expression and uninterrupted flow of the shoot, and having the right tools–not to mention the right people–on hand to make that happen was essential.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering–we were done in fifteen minutes.