Athletic Photography – Under Armour and Lululemon Beach Volleyball Uniform Combination

| by JP Danko | Toronto Commercial Photographer | Athletic Portraits |

Dawn and I recently had the opportunity to photograph female beach volleyball player and model Chanelle Preradovich.  We put this shoot together as a self funded project to create an interesting set of images to add to our stock portfolio.

We ended up scheduling things just after the close of the London 2012 Olympics, so I guess we were suffering from a little bit of Olympic withdrawal.

Chanelle plays college women’s volleyball at Mount Saint Vincent University.  She also plays in a number of competitive beach volleyball leagues in Toronto during the summer.

Beach Volleyball Serve

Beach Volleyball Bump

Beach Volleyball Dig

Female Beach Volleyball Athlete

Beach Volleyball Block

Beach Volleyball Spike

Concept

If you search for “beach volleyball uniform”, you inevitably end up with a whole lot of images of…well you can guess.  (There is a reason beach volleyball is one of the most sought after Olympic events…)

The point is, most of the images of female beach volleyball players are all the same – and not exactly the types of images that clients want to use to promote their business.

For this shoot, we wanted to do create something different – we wanted to really highlight the pure athleticism of beach volleyball players.

Wardrobe

Chanelle is wearing a set of Under Armour beach volleyball bottoms, and a Lululemon sports bra top.  It was actually pretty difficult to put together a genuine beach volleyball uniform that would be similar to what Olympic level competitive beach volleyball athletes wear.

We really didn’t want to cop out and end up just photographing another model in a bikini on the beach.

Chanelle regularly wears a similar set of Under Armour bottoms, and a Lululemon sports bra top for beach volleyball tournaments, so we were pretty happy with the combination.

Lighting

First of all, the beach volleyball court location that we chose faces east.  So, in order to take advantage of a dramatic sky with premium light, we had to start our session at dawn – around 6:00 am.  Fortunately, Chanelle is a morning person – but Dawn and I are definitely not!

For lighting, we used a typical three light setup.  The key light is an Elinchrom BxRi-500 with a beauty dish.  One rim light is another Elinchrom BxRi-500 but with a strip softbox.  The other rim light is the rising sun.

For power we used a small portable generator.

Post-Production Editing

To finish the images off, we ran everything through Topaz Denoise to clean things up.  Then we cleaned up most of the distractions in each image, used Topaz Detail to add a little pop to Chanelle‘s clothing and skin and parts of the sky, and dodged the highlights and burned the shadows in Photoshop.

Conclusion

Any questions about the setup, lighting or post-production editing – hit me in the comments.  Cheers!

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