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Hey Old Hat blog readers. On Tuesday I promised you that we'd go behind the scenes on how this shot came about. Now is that time!

This photo of Durant is one photograph I made during the OKC Thunder's annual mediaday extravaganza in a very short time period. Lest you think that I'm given some kind of extraordinary access to these guys to get pictures, I assure you that I do not. This was my third year shooting the players and it will take another year's passing until we (hopefully) get the call to do it again.

Just to give you an idea of how long I actually had with Kevin, here's a couple of screenshots showing the metadata from the first frame I made and a shot of the metadata on the last frame I made.

Yep, that's not quite 4 minutes of actual shooting time. My job on media day is to get all of the looks, angles and wardrobe combinations that Oklahoma City's marketing and digital departments may want for the ENTIRE nba season.

Sounds fun right?

Actually it's a tremendous amount of fun. And yes it's a bit stressful. But if you're prepared then it can be a great opportunity to capture a quiet moment with one of the NBA's best players.

This year I had two different photo setups about 20 feet apart in a visitor's locker room in the bowels of the Chesapeake Arena. For the first setup I needed to get shots of all the players against a white backdrop for the Thunder's website, gameday programs, ads, etc. This process involves a lot of conversations that kind of go like this...

"Hey Kevin, can you turn to the left for me please? That looks great!"

"Ok, same thing but lets turn to the right...cross your arms now please..."

"Chin up just a little...turn your chest a bit more towards camera."

Take notes people, these are the amazing verbal cues that bring out the best in your typical NBA superstar.

Year to year these photos look relatively similar. Usually one large light source and perhaps an edge light or two. This year I didn't even light the background separately since all of these pictures are destined to be cutout in photoshop anyway.

(Above: Parabolic umbrella as key light.This was the main setup for all the player shots. )

(Here's the view looking in the other direction and the beauty dish back/edge light.)

Here's the lighting diagram for the main setup just below. The back/edge light is a white Profoto beauty dish and the key light in the front is a 220cm parabolic umbrella. Again, behind the scenes shots of what it actually looked like are above.

Both lights were triggered from a Profoto Acute2 1200 pack that you can see sitting on the ground in the second setup shot. The backdrop is lit by the same key that is lighting the players, just residual light that makes its way that far back. It's not the most even coverage, but again, since these are going to be masked out in Photoshop I decided I could make better use of my other lights elsewhere.

(Above: Final result of the all-purpose player lighting.)

These are the shots that get used by the Thunder mostly. Clean and bright with a bit of a lighting edge. Ok, so now that we've got the assignment covered, what else can I do? That's usually what I'm thinking when I get a chance to do these things. Make sure we get what we need and then try to push it a little bit more.

My second setup was where I wanted to do something a little more "interesting." Below are two different views of the lighting setup for the Durant picture that leads off this post. This picture was lit with 3 lights.

(Above: overhead diagram of lighting setup.)

 (Above: Rookie Reggie Jackson gets ready for his closeup.)

I have an AlienBees white beauty dish as my keylight directly overhead of the players. There's another AlienBees strobe with a 30 degree grid at back camera left and then a speedlight with a blue gel behind the player pointing at the black backdrop.

Right about now you're probably saying to yourself, "Wait a minute Dustin, there's no blue light in that leadoff photo of Durant." For that I applaud you. You're ready to move to Phase Two of your photographic learning experience. It's called The Majesty of the Black and White Photograph.

While I loved the color version of these closeups I also was really digging the black and white conversion, so I decided to start in that direction. Color versions of these player shots will surely be coming your way soon though.

Of course no shot is complete without screwing around in Photoshop for endless hours, trying to decide if film grain looks better applied at 25% strength and 15% size or if it's more epic at 20% strength and 17% size. I think the answer is pretty obvious really if you look at the final product.