Playmakers IV

Carlee Chain sliding & splashing her way through the playmaker photo shoot.

"Uuuuuhhhhh, okay?" Was how Carlee Chain responded when I explained to her what we were going to do for her "playmaker" photo shoot.

 I told her to get her varsity uniform and meet me in the front yard of my house. Oh, and I told her to bring a towel and prepare to get wet. I am sure that I totally confused the Pueblo East High School catcher. I doubt that it help things much when she showed up to find about 8 feet of black plastic staked into my front yard with a flash on either end pointed toward the middle. Ha!


So what we did was put this plastic down in the yard and stake it down with tent spikes. Then I placed a flash on a lightstand at each end of the plastic pointed at the place where I expected her to be in the middle of the plastic. I used a couple of Pocket Wizard radio remotes to trigger the flashes with the transmitter that I placed in the hotshoe of my camera.

After explaining to Carlee how I wanted her to back off and get a run and slide across the plastic my friend Joy Walker went into action. She made use of a plastic mop bucket to shuttle bucket after bucket of warm water from the bath tub in my house and dumped them on the plastic.

Carlee would get one or two slides out of the water and then Joy would be off again to get more water for the next shot.  After the first couple of slides I think Carlee was really starting to get the hang of sliding across the plastic.

When  I showed her a sample of what the photos were looking like on the screen on the back of my camera she seemed to be getting even more excited. She was a great sport and of all the photos I did for the fall "playmakers" I think that she probably was the athlete who had the most required of her for the photo.

I bet that when she had dried off and was driving away she was probably wondering something like, "What did I just do?"

But the best part of the photo isn't the lighting, or the action, or even the water. The best part was that if you look close inside of her batting helmet...she was smiling.

How cool is that?