I got to shoot a freelance portrait assignment of the University of Illinois’ Isiah “Juice” Williams for the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye last weekend at Memorial Stadium in Champaign.
Portraits are not my strong suit, but for the time I was given I was pretty happy with how everything turned out.
The link for the story is at the bottom of this post, but there are no photos. Still a pretty good read…
We don’t get RedEye down here in Central Illinois (or Southern Illinois if you are one of my Chicago friends who think the south suburbs are the central parts of the state), but luckily the RedEye site has a full PDF download of every day’s issue. You can get to that here.
Before the shoot I wandered around the stadium looking for places to use. I was promised 10-15 minutes but told to expect 5-10. That’s not a lot of time to get a few different looks.
I scouted out a few places all right around each other… set up my strobes and did a few test shots of myself. If the exposure looked right I put a piece of tape labeled “JUICE” for where he was supposed to stand and a piece of tape under each flash with the exposure settings. I figured that way I could just grab the lights and go to each spot in a hurry.
And of course… the mandatory picture of me with Juice… too bad I focused on the roof on accident. Oh well.
- Juice is loose (RedEye)
Did you get any direction from any body on what they wanted for the front?
Jay: They sent me a basic outline about looking at the upcoming season and gave me the dimensions for the front… so I guess my answer would be “kind of”.
[...] mentioned in my post about the Juice portrait assignment that I didn’t have much time to work. Yesterday’s portrait of these two soccer forwards [...]