Shooting Hazard

Thanks to Stella Pictures I found myself at Stamford Bridge the other day, not to shoot the match but instead to do portrait of Eden Hazard for the Premier League. The back story is that the Premier League have produced an educational pack to distribute to schools to help children to learn about the famous 1914 World War 1 Christmas Truce and the accompanying football match between the Germans and the Allies. Being Belgian, mr Hazard was an excellent choice for the subject of the shoot. The pictures were to go in a press release & handout from the Premier League to all the big news agencies.The concept was to have Mr Hazard representing the young people of the modern world, flanked by two Chelsea pensioners Steve Lovelock and Dave Thompson, with the actual ball known as the Loos Football, which used during the Battle of Loos in 1915. The shoot was to be carefully lit with shape and form, not slapped in the face with a single on-camera flash, and was to take place pitchside at Chelsea.All fairly simple as these things go. However, a few complications ensued in the way they always seem to do. Firstly, the shoot was due to take place straight after Chelsea's home game against Sunderland. Secondly, we weren't allowed on the pitch. Thirdly, nobody knew what the lighting situation would be. Lastly, post match there is always a turmoil of on pitch and pitchside activity going on.OK - so most of that can be handled. I know Stamford Bridge well enough to predict the pitchside situation and the lack of room there was likely to be. I had 4 lights with me so I could construct pretty much anything I wanted. What I couldn't predict was that Chelsea would lose 1-2 to Sunderland. Sunderland! OMG!!! I'd arrived early at the stadium to ensure I had the chance to check all my gear, re-read the brief etc, so I had the luxury of watching the whole match while nibbling at the rather superb food laid on by the club in the press room. How nice it is to watch a game with my own eyes rather than through a viewfinder! Needless to say the atmosphere was tense and getting worse by the minute as Sunderland went a goal up. Oh dear.The plan was to get down the tunnel and pitchside with the pensioners, the client, the old football and the Chelsea PR rep straight after the match, set up and be ready for Mr Hazard to step in, snap snap snap, job done. However we couldn't get down the tunnel due to some "goings on" after the final whistle - anyone with anything that looked like a camera anywhere near the tunnel was not going to be at all welcome. So we had a 10-15 minute delay while the dust settled. Luckily Mr Hazard hadn't been in the squad for the game so he wasn't going to be mighty grumpy after running his heart out for 90 minutes only to lose (though maybe they'd have won if he'd been playing).The day before a shoot like this I get pretty nervous - it's a "do not mess it up" situation where I simply have to get the shot in a very short period of time - there's plenty of thinking about what could go wrong and what do you need with you to cope with any emergency. Have I got spare batteries/cards/card readers/flashes/cameras/lenses etc etc. Once it's time to do it though that nervousness falls away and it's simply a matter of getting the job done as efficiently and professionally as possible.In this case I'd decided to go with a three light setup, two of my own and then the stadium floodlights as both a rim/separation light and a feature of the shot itself.  I had two speedlights on the stand on the right shooting through a brolly, with one triggered by a pocket wizard and the other on optical slave. On the left was a single speedlight on optical slave triggered by the lights on the right.The initial plan was to get a degree of shading across the subjects with the right hand light on higher power than the left (hence two lights on the stand), but that resulted in too much falloff onto the chap on the left, Instead I found I could boost up both sides to the same power, but still keep the form and shading I wanted especially in the pensioners' red coats. An on camera flash would just have flattened everything out and been rather too harsh. The flashes were on manual, with power settings dialled to suit the situation.As you can see above, there's not a lot of space on the astroturf between the pitch itself and the advertising boards that are just out of shotbelow the picture. For the shoot itself I was positioned between the two light stands on the astro. This dictated a wide lens as I wasn't going to be able to shoot from behind the boards as a crew was dismantling a TV camera that was sitting there. I had decided to use my Sony A7R for the shoot, and had a Canon 1D spare in the bag just in case. The massive resolution of the A7R along with the crazily good image quality was the reason to choose it - I could get several different crops from a single shot if required by using all those 36m pixels. The lens was an Olympus OM 21mm f/3.5 old style manual focus job which is as sharp as you'll ever need. I'm liking manual focus more and more as I know exactly what will be in focus, and the WYSIWYG electronic viewfinder of the A7R has a super focus magnification facility to let you double/triple check quickly and efficiently.I also wanted to get the sky and stadium exposed correctly, so the ambient lighting and sky, plus flash sync speed, dictated a 1/160 shutter speed, ISO 640 and f/8. With that sorted and plenty of test shots done and the pensioners briefed, we were all set for Mr Hazard. It's great when you know everything is working fine! Of course we then had a bit of a wait, during which time the ambient light dipped a bit more requiring a bit of tweaking of the camera settings - in this case dropping the shutter speed a tad (the flash power only being affected by aperture and ISO).Eden turned up, looking very cool indeed, and was very happy to listen while I explained what the shoot was about, what I needed him to do, who the guys in the red coats were, what the book was he was being asked to hold, and why we had an old knackered football. Being the lead on the shoot, I wanted to ensure he knew what he was doing there and that I was the one who would be directing things. He took time to chat to the pensioners and struck me as being an all round nice chap, professional and relaxed.Of course then the groundsmen started to mow the lawn with their phalanx of mowers right behind my carefully assembled subjects. Coupled with the TV crews de-cabling around my feet and security teams searching the stands, it all suddenly became more difficult. Rather than just stand there like an idiot, I said to the subjects that we'd have to hold on for a short time to shoot inbetween lawnmower circuits and made sure they understood what the problem was. I'm a firm believer in letting everyone know what's going on so they remain comfortable and at ease. So I waited for a gap in the array of mowing groundsmen and then shot away, some landscape, some portrait, close in and wide, smiling and not smiling, only about 10 shots altogether, including a couple with groundsmen cunningly hidden behind the subjects mid-stripe. I admit to some chimping to check critial focus inbetween pictures.And that was it. First frame at 19:48 and 57 seconds. Last frame 19:49 and 32 seconds. Mr Hazard was on his way but not before shaking hands with everyone and signing the "Football Remembers" book he'd been holding. As I said, a very polite and gracious young man. Job done pitchside, I went back into the press room and backed up the pictures onto my laptop (annoyingly the A7R only has one card slot), and then backed those up to my Photoshelter account just in case.The pictures looked good, nicely exposed and sharp, the Chelsea PR man was happy as it had been slick & fast, the Premier League PR man was happy as he'd got his shots as per the brief, and the pensioners were happy to have been involved.Of course on the way home I thought of all the other pictures I could have made but hadn't crossed my mind at the time or had been forgotten in the heat of the moment. I had a shot plan that was to nail the shots required in the brief, and then try some side angles, different subject positions & poses and so on. It's so nice to overdeliver. But all that went out of the window when the lawnmowers arrived - annoyingly I lost my own mental focus when trying to solve the lawnmower problem and ran out of brain space for the more creative side of things. I know the subjects would have happily posed for another minute for me so I should have made sure I stuck to my plan rather than wrapping the shoot once I had the brief nailed.That's the biggest lesson from this shoot for me - a really good reminder to not let the invevitable distractions distract you. Handle them, and force your brain to park them away allowing space for a bit of creativity. Ask yourself "what else can I do with what I've got in front of me". In this case I had planned what I wanted but only executed the "must do" bit of the plan, whereas I suspect the "could do" bit might have yielded some more interesting shots. But hey, everyone was happy so let's leave it at that this time!