Basketball Players of the Year...

It's that time of year again to shoot our annual All-Big Country basketball players. This year I kept with a similar idea of the dark background. For the first team players I like to have them all with the same pose, but I like to have two options just in case I end up needing more than one photo for one reason or another. The one good thing that I did this year was gave myself more time to get the photos shot. For the first time, I think, ever I had two weeks to get all of the photos done. Which after last year was really needed.

For the MVP's I try to change things up a little bit. I go to shoot them in their gyms. That way there's more room and a basket to use in the background. I ended up shooting Marquos Barnes (top photo), the boys player first. I always try to get at least two shots of the players, the first one is kind of an easy shot, mostly to get the player comfortable with everything. The nice thing about shooting high school kids as opposed to pros, is the high school kids will always give you all the time you need to make a nice photo. Another great way of getting kids on board with the photo is showing them the photo in the LCD screen, once they see how cool it looks they'll work with you to make the best photo possible, after all it's their picture that's going to be in the paper.

The girls player of the year was Peyton Little (above). This was good and bad. She had been player of the year last year and was great to work with, that was the good. The bad was, she was player of the year last year and I needed to shooting something different than I had the year before. Since I had shot Barnes looking like he was going up for a basket, I decided to keep with the same idea for her, plus last year we did a shot of her dribbling the ball.

For the rest of the players of the year I went with side views with a warming gel on their faces and a colored gel with the team color behind them. I liked the way the photos turned out. They were different from the head on shots I had done the last couple of years despite keeping the same style. I also did a second shot of the player from the front, but for the most part I like the side views the best.