Cover shoot with Annika

A cover can set the tone for any publication.

Have a bad image on a cover, and no one will want to pick it up. When I was a Design Director for a weekly golf pub, it drove me nuts to have bad art for the cover. So when I get assignments for covers I always keep that in mind.

Last week, I had a cover feature shoot with Hall of Famer Annika Sorenstam for Pregnancy Magazine. During my time at the golf magazine, I had a chance to photograph Annika on several occasions, both on and off the course. Being familiar with where we were shooting (at Annika’s golf Academy in Reunion) and with the subject made going into a shoot for a new client a little less stressful.

In the weeks leading up to the shoot, I bounced a few location ideas around with the editor for the portraits she wanted along but the day of the shoot we dropped a couple and added a couple of others.

For me, lighting is everything when it comes to portraits, and always like to give clients the basics and something a little stronger. On this shoot, with two assistants in tow we used a bit of both available and strobe lighting.

After shooting each exercise for the feature, we would shoot a portrait for another option. As the make up artist and stylist got Annika ready with a different wardrobe, we set up three different locations for shooting outside. One was pure natural light, the other two lit.

One of the types of locations the editor mentioned she really liked came from a series of portraits I had done a couple of years ago of LPGA players in some tall ornamental grass. Funny thing was the images she saw in my portfolio were taken 50 feet from Annika’s academy.

It was the one area I really hope we could shoot since I was not able to get Annika there two years ago. After two fairly quick sets in different locations outside and two wardrobe changes, the grass was our final set of a 4- hour shoot.

I knew that set up, I just hoped Mother Nature would cooperate and give us some nice white clouds in the blue sky. Because the image I wanted from that set would be lit strong to have the background drop about a stop, stop and half and the clouds would break up a solid blue sky nicely.

With the lights set and my two assistants holding the 4×6 scrim to shade Annika, who was dressed for fall despite the near 100 degree temps, we shot quick and came away with images everyone was happy with.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Portraits and tagged with exercise, Feature, Golfer, indoors, LPGA, magazine cover, Orlando, outdoors, Portrait, pregnant, professional, Scott A. Miller, Sweden, swedish, women golf. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.