When you’re shooting pro athletes, don’t expect to get a lot of time. You can either panic or embrace it.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were in the midst of their Super Bowl run when ESPN the Magazine sent me to shoot defensive end Simeon Rice. With only a half hour to do so, my job was to come away with as much variety as I could in the time I had to make my editor happy.
While you can walk in with a high-speed motor drive and machine gun the hell out of the shoot, the best approach is often to do just the opposite.
We kept things very simple, shooting outdoors in available light against a plain black background using Polaroid Type 665 Positive/Negative film with my vintage Graflex Super D camera.
You shoot, pull the Polaroid to process, wait 15 seconds, peel it apart, drop the negative side into cold water, and look at the positive to see what you got.
I shot 39 frames. Five of them ended up in the magazine.
Shoot less. Think more. Make every shot count.
Miami celebrity portrait photographer Brian Smith photographs Hollywood’s A-List and Fortune’s 500 for magazines and advertising. He’s a Sony Artisan of Imagery, X-Rite Master Coloratti, Adobe Influencer and author of best-selling books on photography.
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Filed under: Portrait, Shooting Tagged: Brian Smith, Brian Smith Pictures, dramatic portraits, portrait photography, Sport Portrait, Sports Portrait 
