Hopefully he’ll still be around once I arrive and I’ll get a chance to get some photos myself.
It probably goes without saying, but I’m really looking forward to this trip. There are going to be a lot of posts coming as I visit the Team USA training camp, do some work with my fellow Binghamton Bearcat Emily Mackay (who is running in the women’s 1,500m), and produce some other client work that I’ll reveal as they happen. Very exciting!
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As we approach the opening ceremonies and the excitement of the build-up increases towards the wrestling competition beginning August 5th, I’ve been reminded of the portraits I took of the world team members at the 2023 Final X/Beat the Streets event in Newark, NJ.1
I really had a blast doing these and it was a whirlwind of a production. I wrote about it in a LinkedIn post on August 28, 2023:
How long is a minute?
During Final X back in June, I put together a pop-up portrait studio in the hallway under the Prudential Center arena stands to capture some images of all the champions as they exited their final matches. The idea was to get them fresh from qualifying for the world team, before or after their interviews in the mixed zone (as we could grab them), and before they headed off to doping control. Meanwhile, there were still two other mats running at the same time - and I was also covering the action. It was a busy night.
With Richard Immel helping to wrangle everyone, we were able to collect all 29 of the series winners (plus, I got the 30th at a special wrestle-off a couple weeks ago to fully finish the mission). I had two lighting setups and powered through a quick succession of prompts to get what amounted to four complete, matching collections of photo assets featuring every member of this year's USA Wrestling senior world team, in addition to another 8 usable images of each wrestler (on average) that weren't included in the full sets.
Average time spent with each athlete: 48 seconds.
With the world championships starting September 16th in Belgrade, Serbia, I've started counting down by posting a set, one world team member a day, to my Instagram account (first post here). This is The Joy Series. Often, the go-to look for battle-worn competitors is gritty, intense, and dark. The idea here was to highlight more of the happiness and personality of each individual as they freshly experienced the feeling of hitting a big goal. For 12 of them, this marked their first senior world team, making the moment particularly special. (And don't worry, I got gritty, intense, and dark in the other setup.)
If you're in need of portraits, headshots, event photos, or marketing collateral, get in touch. I'd be happy to work with you to create something exciting. And while it doesn't have to get done in 60 seconds or less, it's good to have the option if necessary.
The two-stop setup. Athletes came from the right, stood between the two umbrellas for the first round, and then moved to in front of the flag, beneath the octobox for the additional looks.
Until now, I didn’t have a way to share what those sets looked like in a way that satisfied me. I did one-by-one posts of each of the Joy portraits, and that was great, but I didn’t feel like it did justice to the entire body of work. I’ve always wanted to have them in a Brady Bunch-style grid like they are below. This is more gratifying, and hopefully, better to look at, too. Let me know what you think.
This is The Joy Series, as described above:
The Joy Series: portraits of the 2023 USA Wrestling World Team in all three styles.
The second set was a group I titled Pride & Glory. I did two versions, one in color and one in black & white. USA Wrestling used these when making happy birthday posts of the athletes, like this one, for David Taylor. It was a really solid usage, I thought.
Pride & Glory in color.
Pride & Glory in black & white.
The last set was one where I tried to push myself and come up with a look that was different from what I usually do. I find that my photojournalism instinct to make everything look as accurate to the in-person visual as possible can inhibit my creative exploration when it comes to color treatment and post-processing variety.
In general, my goal is color and exposure accuracy, not a stylized distortion of what really was. And in all honesty, part of that is a crutch I’ve used because I don’t always trust my feel for whether something looks good or not. Lots of times I’ll finish post-processing an image only to come back to it hours or days or months later and wonder how I ever thought I had done a good job. It’s wild how perception shifts and changes over time. Then I worry that other people will see the hack job too and realize I’m not any good at this. And so that, in part, has led me to avoid branching out into more stylized post-processing.3
I felt like this was a great opportunity to challenge that fear and explore. In fact, that’s the biggest reason I agreed to do the portraits. Richard had asked me if I was interested and I actually said no at first. I knew I was already going to be swamped with client work from the competition itself, so I thought it would be too much to take on to try and do portraits as well. I thought I would miss too much of the wrestling and not get what I needed for my clients. However, the challenge of pulling off something “impossible” and being able to do more of this kind of work made the inquiry too good to pass up. So within a few minutes of the conversation, I had talked myself into it and changed my initial no to a yes.
I was excited. And really scared. I had very serious concerns about whether I could get all the jobs done in a satisfactory way. It honestly was too much. But I was going to do it anyway.
In the week leading up to Final X, I spent a few hours doing test shoots to figure out how I wanted to light the portraits and the workflow that would enable it to happen, and then another few hours playing around in Lightroom trying to develop a common treatment I would apply to all of the final images.
Some of those tests:
Some of my light and post-processing test images.
After sharing images with Richard and doing some more tweaks, this green hazy look is what I settled on for the final images:
The Green Haze Series.
And also as a gif:
I still don’t know if they’re “good” or not. Sometimes I look at them and I think they’re interesting and I’m proud, and other times I think I pushed too far in certain areas, that it was too heavy handed, and I have a twinge of embarrassment.
Ultimately, I’m happy that I pushed myself to do it. I did miss a lot of the competition, but since they were best-of-three series, I was able to photograph the first matches uninterrupted, so I at least had some coverage of everyone I needed.
And the portraits were a great exercise. Lots of fun, pushed myself, got creative, and delivered a few different sets of images. Well worth the leap of faith.
I’m going to add a bunch more of the extra images in a different article here. It’s partially to keep this post shorter, but also as a test to see how much traffic gets directed from a link at the end of an article. It’ll give me a sense of 1) how many people read all the way to the end, and 2) how many people are interested in more. Maybe this is how I can provide lots of content to free subscribers while also saving some bonus material to the paid subscribers? If you have any thoughts on this, let me know!
Well, 28 of the 30, anyway. I had to get Helen Maroulis at her wrestle-off in Colorado Springs two months later, and I didn’t complete the set until the World Championships when I had the opportunity to photograph Mason Parris. Helen’s Final X series had been postponed due to medical reasons, and Mason assumed the berth after Gable Steveson withdrew from the team.
