Soccer playmaker

Matt Karn of Pueblo Centennial High School was chosen as the playmaker for boys soccer.

I have seen many amazing action portraits of soccer players. Now I had a chance to try something a little different myself.

A couple hours before Matt showed up at The Chieftain I was across the street at the glass store trying to buy a piece of glass that would support a 170-pound high school athlete. The response I got from the folks at the glass company was, “You want to do what with the glass?” I am not real sure that they understood what I was going to do with the Plexiglas even after I explained it to them.

They did find a piece of Plexiglas form me. I got it, headed back across the street to the paper and proceeded to try to figure out what to do next. Originally I was going to shoot the photo on the school’s practice field, but it was an extremely windy day so that was out of the question.

I walked around our building and managed to find a corner of the parking lot that was shielded from the wind by the building. It also offered me a chance to plug an extension cord in to an outlet in the building for the one Elinchrom strobe I would be using.

I kidnapped four chairs from our lunchroom to rest the Plexiglas on. I then set up the light and crawled under the Plexiglas with my camera and wide-angled lens. Matt was tentative at first, but after he realized that the Plexiglas would support his weight he was fine.

I discovered that the chairs that the Plexiglas was resting on were about 6 inches too short to get the photo I was trying to get. I basically had to frame the photo and then place the camera on the ground to squeeze him in to the frame.

You can picture me laying in the parking lot under glass with a high school soccer player standing on glass suspended on chairs above me as I squirmed around with my camera and my boss was listening to my direction and trying to aim the light and softbox diffuser the direction I needed it. It was quite a site!

All in all I would say it was worth the effort and the stains to my clothes from laying in the parking lot. And mother nature did a pretty amazing job on the sky too!