Volleyball playmaker

The girls volleyball playmaker for 2007 is Brittany Maab of Pueblo West High School.

I showed up at the school near the end of the school day. We couldn’t use the gym after school as basketball practice was going to be taking place in the gym at that time. The school’s athletic director was gracious enough to set it up so that the P.E. class would us an auxiliary gym so that I could photograph Brittany in the main gym.

Brittany, along with the help of one of the P.E. instructors put up the standards and the net for the photo. I brought all my cameras, flashes, light stands, remotes and yes a mini trampoline. At first Brittany was a bit apprehensive about jumping on the trampoline as earlier in her high school athletic career she had knee surgery on each of her knees to repair torn anterior cruciate ligaments.

I couldn’t blame her, but I also told her I would let her jump on the tramp a couple of times to see if she thought she could do it and if not, we’d just scrap it. She gave it a try and decided that it wasn’t going to be that hard on her knees and we went ahead and used it. I brought the tramp because typically high school volleyball players don’t have a vertical jump that gets their faces above the net and that was where I wanted her for the photo.

I placed the tramp to the side and Brittany would take a few quick strides and then jump onto it and raise her arms as the P.E. instructor would through a ball for her to block. After a couple of dozen runs, jumps tosses, and blocks I had enough to chose from and our time in the gym was over. I thanked Brittany for all of her efforts and headed back to the paper.

After a few days of looking through the images I made in the gym I decided that the photo just needed something more but I wasn’t sure what that was. I finally decided that I would do some post processing to see if I could spice things up a bit. I happened upon an idea to add several more balls to the photo and that seemed to do the trick. The only other thing I did was add a bit of motion to each ball so that the balls didn’t look like they were hanging from strings or something. I am not big on doing post processing and most of my work doesn’t allow it, but this time it seemed to work.

Can you tell which ball is the only one in the original frame? I'll never tell.