Sports Portraits: Tips and Techniques for Capturing Athletic Photographs

Setup

When photographing portraits outdoors in great evening light, you still need to add some of your own light to fill in the shadows and control the exposure of the photograph.

Here is the setup for the chapter opener shot. I was photographing on location at a park and set up two lights, one on either side of the subject. The main light was a small flash off to the left, and the fill light was a flash fired through a softbox. This gave me the harder light on camera left and some fill on camera right, producing the dramatic look I was after.

For portraits taken in the evening, the concept is to use the natural light as a backdrop and underexpose ...