I recently had the privilege of photographing Oshawa Generals captain Jeff Hayes with his Olympic Torch. Hayes took part in the Torch Relay on December 16, 2009 leading up to the 2010 Olympic Games.
This is one of those shoots where prior planning is an absolute must. I knew how I wanted Jeff to pose, but the real difficulty is in lighting a flag properly. If you light a flag with frontal lighting you get a large amount of reflectance off the sheer fabric. Since you can actually see through the material, you can’t just throw light onto it from behind. You have to create a wall of light to give even illumination. In this case, creating a wall approximately 40′x20′.
Some of the greatest requirements to be a successful photographer is having the ability to visualize the image you want to convey, and to foresee technical issues that will separate your images from those of an amateur. This may seem like a simple photo shoot but in reality our crew spent 4 hours in planning, from scouting the best location to hold the shoot to testing the opacity of the flag material. Add in a 3 hour set up of the flag and black curtains to block off the stray light and many test images, not to mention the shoot itself, these images took over 8 hours to produce.
Was it worth the effort? After all, any GWC (guy with camera) can just stick a flash on the camera and fire away.
My answer is absolutely! Would you want a photographer to cut corners on your once in a lifetime shoot? I didn’t think so.
