Ed Hagen is one of the top runners in Denver and he was in need of some athletic portraits for his portfolio and also for “showing his kids that he was fit.” 🙂 I love doing athlete photography sessions because you get to really feature the human body as art. As you can see from the photos, Ed is in great shape and I specifically lit him to add even more definition to his muscles and figure. The outdoor images were taken in the RiNo (River North) neighborhood of downtown Denver and then we went inside to Ed’s loft for some more portraits. Ed has a proclivity towards grafitti so we chose to incorporate some of the many murals around the area in the backgrounds.
Click below to see the rest of Ed’s Denver athlete portraits.
I wanted to include this great clear blue sky as a background for a few images but had the issue of fighting with the strong sun light. Without additional light, I would have had to choose to expose for the sky or Ed as seen in the image below.
In order to get what I wanted, I brought in an off-camera flash on a remote and placed it high up to the left of the camera and aimed it at Ed. With the added light, I was able to over-power the sun and get the look I was going for.
The next few images were taken in Ed’s awesome loft that would make a great photo studio in itself. To create some separation from the background, I used two lights for this series. One was to camera left and the other was behind Ed to camera right, pointed back at him. For male athlete portraits, I prefer strong sharpening and local contrast to really make them pop and I bumped both of these up in the digital darkroom.
Thanks Ed for a fun shoot!