Muscatine Girls Softball Poster

I've been doing the Muscatine Girls' Softball poster now for a couple of years and each year they have gotten better.  The first year the coach wanted to do a circus theme which was very fun,  the next year the coach was thinking about doing something with Harleys and using the saying "Ready to Rumble."  I tweaked it slightly since I have seen a lot of posters with Harleys and suggested to him that instead of Harleys we use monster trucks.  That poster was very cool and unique! 

This year one of my seniors that I had photographed was in charge of coordinating everything with me.  She had the idea of doing something along the lines of the popular TV series Band of Brothers - except Band of Sisters.  I asked if they were willing to get a little dirty for some close up shots and they were. 

The day that they came in we did a series of images with them silhoetted on a green screen and then I brought in a bucket of dirt I had dug up especially for them from my back yard.  They had a lot of fun smearing eachother with dirt  (and a lot of instagram images were posted)  Then we did a series of headshots for the poster.  I told them not to leave however and after we were done with that I did another quick series of headshots using a ring light and posted them on facebook for them.

Here is the final poster!

a sample of one of the portraits I took for the girls to use for their facebook profile

Fun New Track Team Composite!

So each time I have to create a new team composite one of the biggest challenges is coming up with cool new ideas.  The day before they came in I had no ideas what so ever.  I was completely blank and to be honest feeling a little of the winter blues.  I spent that evening randomly searching for some kind of inspiration.  Not only did I have the girls track team to create something for but also the guys track team and the golf team. 

About the 10,000 page of google images I came across an image of The Wizard of Oz with the yellow brick road and I knew I had found my inspiration for the girls track poster.  My next big step was coming up with elements to create the background.  I have a vast library of stock images I have shot from all of my travels and began going through them.  I was just recently out in Palm Springs with some other photographers and we had visited Joshua Tree National Park and I had some awesome mountain vistas that I knew I could use for the background. 

 

The foreground was a little tougher. I gathered tons of possible elements and began experimenting with different options, different colors and different lighting situations. I tried everything from Angry tree stumps to huge flowers and ended up not using many of them.  I also did a lot of studying of the newest Oz movie poster that was recently released while working on my poster. I didn't want to copy it but it's great to see how they use different elements to draw the viewers eye to certain areas and create interest.

 

It was a long process but I finally achieved the look I wanted with lots of different little elements and overlays to get the color saturation that I was looking for.

Notice the lane numbers I added into the yellow brick road!

Below are a few of the other elements that I used to create the scene

 

These backlit flowers were shot for a poster I created last year with a Hunger Games Theme

 

 

This flowering tree is in my front yard and was taken last year right before we did my daughter's 2 year pictures under it.

This was also taken last year during a camping trip.  This is the curved rock on the left side of the poster.  I simply erased parts of the rock to create the shape I wanted.

A few sweet new team posters!

This year has been especially busy with creating cool posters for teams in my area.  Most of the time these are my "treat" to myself because I get to stretch my abilities and see what I am capable of creating.  These are not really anything I make money at but something I just like doing and helps get my name out to seniors.  I've been in mass production mode lately though and when I am creating something I don't like to have time be a factor so in the future I may have to find a way to limit the number of posters I do each season.

There were almost 50 guys!  by far the largest I have attempted.  This was printed on a 9x27" poster for the school

The guys wanted to do a theme along the lines of the popular Ax Men show on the Discovery Channel.  I created this background from some images I had taken while teaching some photography classes in Oregon and some of my neighbor's trees.

TThe coach wanted to use the fact that 212 is right at the point water boils. The background was from an abandoned factory in Cincinnati

They wanted to do a cowboy theme.  The background was something I captured in Tucson this year and the horses were my parents' (it's good to know people :)

This team drove almost two hours to have me create their team poster.  The coach wanted to do something along the lines of the new Avengers movie that came out this summer.  (The team captains are the super heroes)

The Muscatine Volleyball team - I've photographed a lot of these girls multiple times in the studio this year. They are a lot of fun to be around and they are pretty comfortable hanging out here. They made themselves completely at home - dancing to songs, hanging around on couches and making fun of each other.