A couple of weeks before Christmas, I got a call from the photo editor at the Houston Chronicle, looking to see if I would be able to shoot a portrait of one of the Packer players at Lambeau field. The image would run on the front page of the sports section in one of their upcoming issues. Of course I said yes and started getting the shoot organized over the few days that followed.

The player I would be shooting was Demetri Goodson, a rookie corner who grew up in Houston. The paper had been following his career throughout high school and college and now into the pros. Demetri actually played college basketball for a couple seasons before transferring schools to play football his last two years. He thought the NFL would be a better fit than the NBA. (Must be tough having to choose which pro sport you want to play)

Our original idea for the portrait was to shoot Demetri in front of his locker in the Packers locker room. After a few e-mails back and forth with the Packers PR staff, we found out we wouldn’t be able to shoot in the locker room. Being pretty familiar with Lambeau my self, I suggested some other spots that I thought would be good places to make a cool portrait. Unfortunately, the only place we were granted access to shoot was in a small media room used to shoot video interviews. Not the most ideal place, but I knew we could come up with something. I decided we would shoot Demetri on a solid colored seamless background and place the emphasis on him in the portrait.

The day of the shoot, my assistant and I got to the stadium about two hours before we were scheduled to have Demetri on set. The Packers PR staff gave us access to the room when ever we wanted to get in that day. I figured two hours would give us plenty of time to get set up and do some test shots. I’d always rather be set up, ready to go, and have to wait around for the subject and not have the subject waiting for us to try to scramble to get ready to shoot. We got set up and tested everything with about a half hour to spare.

When Demetri arrived, we talked a little bit before we got him out on set. We introduced ourselves and quickly got to know each other before we talked about the type of shots I was looking to get. It’s always good to try to get your subject comfortable before you put them in front of the camera. Thankfully Demetri was very easy to work with and was willing to let his personality to come out. We shot some standing and sitting shots on our background and 15 min later (the amount of time we were given to shoot him) we were done.

All in all, I think the shoot was a success. The paper was happy with the shots and so was Demetri. Anytime you can make your client happy, you know your shoot was successful. Here are a couple of my favorite frames. Thanks for looking.

Matt