For the past four years, I have been making (end of season) stylized images for some of the Casa Roble (Orangevale, CA) varsity football players. I started making high contrast images on white and expanded to some on-field images two years ago. My goal was to make the type of images I wish I had as a player. These guys work very hard all year and it means a lot to me to make an image of this part of their life.

This year due to a scheduling conflict, I couldn't use the school's field, so I moved the shoot to my studio.

I wanted to continue with the white background style and didn't want to give up on the field look so after a quick trip to home depot and a purchased 12 by 8-foot section of artificial grass, I had a field style look in the studio.

I made two sets with two cameras. Set 1 had a white background, while Set 2 had the artificial turf. I wanted to be able to shoot them against the white background and then go straight to the turf set.

Set 1 was designed with four alien bee lights. For this set, I used grids and snoots to highlight different parts of the players. This style translates well with the high contrast black and white.

The camera for this set was the Nikon D810 with a Sigma 105 art lens.

For field set lighting, I wanted to replicate the look of a stadium light, so I started with 1 Indra 500 with a wide-angle reflector with grid high and directly behind the players. The second and main light was to camera left for that I used the Solas Strip Softbox with Grid. That was positioned fairly high and angeled down to minimize the spill on the ground. For the 3rd light, I used a 7inch dish with a 20dgrwe grid to camera left; I wanted that light to skip across the front of the players.

The last part of the look was a little smoke from the fog machine; it just seems to give it the depth I like.

All images were edited with the new Luminar 4

The camera was the Nikon z6 with the Sigma 85 art lens.