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The Best for Last
January 2, 2007So...what was my absolute favorite photograph from 2006?
Honestly..there really wasn't much of a contest. I couldn't have done a better job with this shot if I tried.
Rider soph. quarterback Shavodrick Beaver takes the stage for the Raiders on Friday nights this season. (Jason Palmer/Times Record News)
I found out that I was going to be the photographer assigned to shoot the portraits for the 2006 High School Football preview section for the newspaper. It's about a 100 page publication with season previews and photographs of just about every high school within a 75-mile radius of Wichita Falls.
I hadn't done the main photos before, but they knew that I could make something really really cool based on some of the previous sports-portrait work I had done.
The story was basically Rider High School had a pair of really dynamic sophomores who were starting in the two most prominent positions on the field....quarterback and running back.
For these kids...it was their big-lights debut and I wanted to shoot them in a theater-type setting.
So...I contacted the prettiest theatre in town. The Wichita Theatre.
The inside of this thing is amazing....and I wanted to make sure it looked it.
We used three shots total...both of them in a portrait outside in front of the theatre....and then single portraits of each of them for the inside pages.
The other shots from the entire shoot were really good too...but this one just jumped out to me and really made me excited. That's not something that happens all the time with all of the other photos you've seen from me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of the things that I've done, but there are only a handful of shots that I can look at, months after I took them, and get a real excitement about the photograph.
Beaver was lit with two flash units on either side of him about 8 feet away...and I had the shutter speed slow enough to get the right amount of ambient light from the theatre itself.
It only took about a dozen shots to get it right.
Posted by Jason Palmer at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Comments
Great series Jason. I truly enjoyed looking at these. They are all shots you should be proud of.
