Lobo Profile: Dionne Marsh

I am working on a new portrait project for the Daily Lobo, the school paper for UNM. We are going to be profiling athletes and shooting some nice portraits to go along with it.

Our first athlete is Dionne Marsh of the womens basketball team. One of my goals for this project is to create a portfolio of strong graphic portraits that are well lit and interesting to look at.

These portraits of Dionne Marsh was taken at the Rudy Davalos training center right next to the PIT. I've included a few shots of the lighting set up as well.

All the above shots were shot with a Canon MK IIn with a 70-200mm lens at 1/250th at F-4.5. The lighting set up is below.

(above) The lighting set up for the shot. I origionally set up an octabank but decided to go with the medium softbox with a grid on an Alien Bee 1600 head.

(above) This is the light that was behind the wall lighting up the glass windows around Dionne. It's an Alien Bee 800 with a standard reflector powered by a vagabond power pack.

The whole shoot from arrival to when i left took about an hour. However, I only photographed Dionne for about 5-10 minutes. Preparation is key when it comes to working with subjects limited on time. So I arrived early with about 30 minutes to set up and test lighting, then plan for about 10 mintues to shoot and then time to pack up.

Having a location planned along with a few ideas and lighting planned out in your head before you arrive to shoot is key to doing this successfully.

-Sam