I have been incredibly busy photographing athletes this year!  The Faison Recreation and Wellness Center has asked me photograph their athletes since 2014. Basketball players are the largest group of young athletes I work with l, but I also photograph boys and girls from sports such as volleyball, baseball, and soccer. This year had the largest number of athletes with which I have ever worked! That's a great sign for future athletic teams at the local high schools! I want to thank Matthew Scott, Director for Faison Recreation and Wellness for helping to schedule the players and teams.  This year I worked with 21 basketball teams and photographed 128 players. Girls volleyball had 10 teams with 62 players photographed and soccer had 6 teams with 32 players photographed. 

I bring a background to photograph the indoor sports, but I do quite a bit of editing to them. If there are enough athletes to photograph, I do something called compositing in Photoshop. That's when you cut out a player from the background and add a more interesting background. I create my own digital backgrounds from images I've taken. I've seen other photographers use templates that they purchase, but then you have to worry about your photographs looking like every other photographers images. I like to think that I am a creative enough photographer and editor to make my own templates!

When I photographed the athletes for basketball, I gave them a choice of three poses: dribbling the ball, holding the ball, or shooting the ball. I get the athlete's preference, but I also check with the parents to make sure they are okay with that decision. If an athlete choses dribbling, they have to pass my test. They have to be able to dribble the ball and look at the camera at the same time. This is, of course, the most difficult of the the three poses to capture, because I have to time the photo just right. I wait until the ball is about waist high and the fingers must be touching the ball. If you don't have the player's fingers touching the ball, then they'll look like a wizard levitating a sphere. 

I most recently worked with the volleyball players and teams. I also gave them three pose choices: holding the ball, serving the ball, or bumping the ball. Most girls chose to hold the ball, but I also had a few that chose serving and bumping. If a girl chose to have the bump pose, I would tell them to hold their arms out and that a real volleyball would not be in the shot. The reason you can't do a bump pose with a live volleyball, is that it would hit my strobe lights and would be difficult to time the shot. I told the players I would add the volleyball later in Photoshop and that it would look realistic. I like to add little details that other photographers might not bother with. An example is that I changed the color of the volleyball to match the color of every player's jersey. I created the background from a photo of an old crumpled road that I took near the beach. The ocean had destroyed the road, but I knew it would make for a great background later on in a composite image. I then added a volleyball net made from hexagon shapes from a tool in Photoshop.