Track and Golf Posters

Yes, it's the start of a new sport season so I have been blogging about my newest posters.  Just finished up with the guys track and the golf posters.  To be honest I had no ideas of what I was going to do with the posters.  Yes, even I go blank occasionally.  But I know how to light and I know how to composite so I figured I would take their pictures first and then come up with a cool background.  The only thing is when I do it this way I can't get too crazy with the posing and have to remain somewhat generic.  But each team wanted at least 14 people on the poster and on the final product I also have to include a schedule and a list of sponsors, which makes it very difficult to come up with a cool background and include a large amount of team members. 

For the golf I came up with the idea of Daily Dose of Iron.  There is a steel mill in town that employs a large amount of people and I thought it would be cool to gain access to the mill and take some sweet pictures inside for the background.  But after a few phonecalls I found out that for some reason they are very relucant to let me in.  Instead I was able to tweak some other images to create what I needed.  But it ended up looking much like I think I would have been able to get inside the mill.

The guys track I was at a complete loss of what to do.  I spent forever looking for something that would inspire me.  I saw a burning tire somewhere and thought it was cool but decided to change the tire to a stopwatch, but I still wasn't sure what to do for a motto.  After a lot of attempts I came up with "It's go time and inserted a bunch of other clocks in the background.  I tried to stick to the blue and gold theme for the posters because those are the school colors.  I think it turned out pretty well for having no idea when I took the individual shots.

Track Team Posters

Here are my two newest creations for the track teams.  For the girls I wanted to create something that could show off a bunch of them running, jumping and throwing.  I decided to try something with the sole of a shoe and make it look similar to a track seen from above.  I think the graphic turned out pretty strong and it turned out to be a fun concept.

For the guys track I have been wanting to try my hand at creating some tornados. The road was an image I had taken last year right after a storm and I simply warped and transformed the clouds into a funnel shape. Then replicated the tornado to create a few different ones in the background. Adding some extra mist and debris using some photoshop brushes really helped make the tornados more realistic though. The hardest part about the whole poster was taking the portraits. I had to have the guys run at me very quickly and trigger the shutter at exact moment when they reached the pre-appointed spot. Not only did I have to time it perfectly but the guys had to look good at that exact moment when they were running full speed at me which was probably even harder than timing the shutter.