Your Best Portraits

This is a portrait I wanted to create for years. Finally, when I met the coach at one of my son's football games, I asked him and he said, "yes". I never had this coach as a player, but he left a huge impression on me and my entire team when we defeated his state ranked high school football team in a regular season game at his stadium. He came onto our bus after the game and congratulated us, and looked forward to playing us again in the playoffs. This was something we had never seen in a coach. The integrity and humility was unmatched. Years later, when I got into coaching, I called him to ask for advice. I ended up working at the school where he coached and got to know him better. He never told me that he had won over 300+ games and only had one losing season in a 40 year coaching career. I wanted to create something that would honor him, and be a reminder of what his career meant to all of the athletes that he mentored. There's more that came from this image, but I'll leave that for another time.
As far as the photograph is concerned. I photographed him in a classroom. I lit him with a cross-light type of lighting set up. A 4x6' softbox, rotated horizontally, to subject left, was my main light. A smaller softbox was lined up touching the main light slightly in front but off center to subject left, about 2 stops less that main as a fill light. And I added a 10x36 stripbox as a kicker light from the opposite back side (to separate him from background). I wanted this to be a classic, outdoor, on field, and "in his environment" kind of portrait. The only problem was our schedules didn't match up. So I photographed the stadium during civil twilight on another day. I captured several exposures, then blended them together in photoshop.
The post-production work involved extracting the coach out of the classroom portrait, and placing him in the stadium image. This image was taken before all the AI extraction tools were developed, so it did take a bit longer that it would have taken if done today. I lit the coach with the mindset of it being taken outside, so the post-processing wasn't difficult. I color graded it to blend the image into a more realistic portrait. This is the beauty of digital.
The coach loved it when I presented him with a 20x30 canvas print as a gift. This is a portrait that took years to go from in my head to tangible form. One of my favorite portraits I've ever done.