Blog

Thanks very much to everyone that commented on the Behind the Shot with Kevin Durant post last week. I've been really impressed and flattered with the response it's been getting. I had no idea that Kevin Durant guy was such a big deal. ;)

I had a couple of other photos this past year that I was pretty happy with, so today I'd like to focus on a job that was shot for The University of Michigan and their football campaign.

Michigan came to us early in the summer to start discussing their direction for the 2011 football season. It was decided that the tagline for the year was going to be "This Is Michigan" after the instant classic Brady Hoke quote.

Once the tagline was in place there was discussion about what kind of imagery should accompany it. Sometimes we'll have specific direction from the client and sometimes we're given free reign to just "make it look cool."

This was definitely a situation where Michigan knew from the start that they wanted a bold image of the helmet. The poster was going to be a statement akin to Brady Hoke's quote, basically proclaiming, "Here's the famous winged helmet, enough said."

I have to say, this approach to a football campaign won't work for everyone. But even though Michigan had been down a bit the previous couple of years, they're still one of the few football schools who could do something like this and just put an image of a helmet on a black background.

This assignment was pretty much wide open. We've been working with Michigan as a client for several years now and there's a certain amount of trust that comes from that. The only direction we received initially was to do something cool with the helmet. On a lot of occasions I like the challenge a brief like this presents. As a photographer it's my job to figure out how to light and present something so it looks cool on a poster.

My first attempts at a bold helmet image were ok, but they didn't have the impact we needed. I started with the shot immediately below. Just the helmet against a dark background, lit with standard strobes and reflectors and such. Not bad but not exactly iconic.

What makes a helmet photo interesting? Tough question really. Great still-life/product photography is still something I'm trying to get the hang of. I actually think this question is one of life's great mysteries, debated by scholars for centuries. Anyway, I decided to play with light some more before adjusting angles or views of the helmet.

I tried experimenting with the background color. I liked where it was going, but it was still basically the same thing as where I started.

Eventually I moved on to light painting. I'd just watched a YouTube video of how they shot a liquor bottle with light painting. Some interesting things going on here, but the helmet was too obscured by the streaks of light and I didn't really like the reflections I was getting on the surface of the helmet.

Of course when in doubt remember the answer to most of life's little problems...fire.

This was accomplished by simply waving a lighter around the helmet with a long exposure, no actual fire touched the helmet. Although I would love to get the go-ahead one of these days to ACTUALLY light something on fire that a client sends.

So far none of this stuff was really blowing the doors off this project though. After some more discussion about the goals of the shot and what had been done so far we decided to go with the front view of the helmet. I also decided I needed to approach the lighting from a whole new angle.

The answer to my problem? Light painting! Who doesn't like playing around with flashlights and sparklers in the dark? I propose that the answer is no one. Sparklers are universally liked by all.

Light painting essentially involves starting with a black box in which to "paint" your subject with light from continuous lights and/or strobes while the camera's shutter is open. I had to black out my apartment windows and of course turn all of the lights off to get what you see above. You can just barely make out the helmet in the darkness. It's suspended by fishing line from the arm of a c-stand in order to get the right angle from the front wihout having to mask out a bunch of stuff later.

Here's the camera data for the above shot and all subsequent light painted versions of the helmet.

I could have went with a shorter exposure and gotten a pure black image without any of the helmet showing up, but I also needed a long enough exposure time to paint the helmet with light.

Once I had a blank canvas to work from I started trying out ideas.

The day before the shoot I went out and bought a bunch of different things to light with. Flashlights, LED lights, glow sticks...things like that. Former Old Hatter Todd Adams drove to the next town to buy sparklers from some random guy selling them out of his garage I think.

Light painting can be hit or miss. It's important to review your images as you shoot and see what works and what doesn't.

We tried different colors of light, different angles, different time periods of having the flashlight on, etc. We lit sparkler after sparkler up in my apartment and set off the smoke alarm numerous times. We basically did everything just short of having the fire department come out.

This video above is a short chronicle of the image-making process shot on Zac's iPhone.

For anyone wondering why we're all dressed in black, it has to do with the light-painting process. When the shutter is open for a long period of time, which in the case of these images was 6 seconds, it will eventually get enough light to the sensor to expose what's in front of it. By dressing in black and wearing black gloves we can stand directly behind the helmet and light paint without becoming part of the exposure. If you look carefully at the image below you can see Todd's neck in the top of the frame where it wasn't covered by his black shirt.

 After all of the experimenting and playing around we eventually found our image.

The overall illumination for the helmet came from a simple flashlight I had in my apartment. (You can see it laying on the ground in Zac's video above.) A sparkler did some nice things creating a halo around the top. And the bottom glow came from a gridded strobe head that I manually fired up into the interior several times during the 6 second exposure.

After a little Photoshop action we had this.

And finally with the edition of the tagline and football game schedule we arrived at the final product.

A couple of months after the image was shot we were in Ann Arbor shooting video and photos on location for several sports and I took the following photo. It was kind of trippy to see the final product, 3 feet tall in some cases, and stacked waist high in the form of posters, media guides, flyers, etc.

This helmet image was basically alone on the front of all of the football print materials for the 2011 season.

 Another big shout-out to former Print Production Manager Todd Adams and Old Hat Creative Owner and Creative Director Zac Logsdon who helped me pull off this image and dressed in all black in the middle of the summer for this shoot. It took a true team effort to accomplish this one. Big props as well to poster designer Geoff Rogers.

And thanks again to Michigan for entrusting us with this project.