Profoto: In The Moment, Pt. I

The following interview originally appeared on the Profoto Blog. Be sure to check out Part Two as well!

Written by Fredrik Franzén on Monday, February 6th, 2012.

We recently received a series of sports images that caught our attention. The man behind the camera turned out to be Joe Morahan, and we responded to his email with curiosity and a deluge of questions. Luckily for us, Joe was kind enough to answer our questions in detail. You can read excerpts from our email conversation below.

Why sports photography, Joe?

“Back in the day, I played a lot of sports. Baseball, basketball, soccer, lacrosse, skiing, snowboarding and biking, to name a few. I loved sports more than anything. There was a feeling I got when competing that was different to anything else I had ever felt. Keep in mind that I am super competitive, but when I hit the field, it was like a complete escape from all other aspects of my life. I simply forgot about everything in life. It was total immersion. Nothing else mattered. It is this ephemeral feeling of freedom that I’m now trying to capture on a photographic shoot.”

Then how come you prefer set shots to live action images?

“Because it allows me to control my environment completely. I establish all the conditions with which my final product will be formed. It’s vastly different to a shoot conducted at live events, where the lighting is set by the stadium officials, the photographic angles established by management, and where there is zero control over the action.”

©Joe Morahan

Which are the crucial factors for creating a successful sports image?

“Lighting is critical. A photo has to have great quality of lighting to create the impression, the depth of emotion, the shadows, lines and accent that is required.”

“Composition has to be spot on. The more interesting the composition, the longer someone will be enraptured by a particular image. As with most forms of art, there may be rules, but great work somehow defies description. You know it when you see it!”

“Of course, focus is hugely important. A blurry photo is no good. Clarity is so appealing to the eye; creating a ‘gotcha’ moment.”

“Lens choice. I can’t stress that enough. A photographer might move up close and personal to a basketball player, having decided to utilize a wide-angle lens to capture a spectacular dunk. But with some forethought, a more striking image can be had. Perhaps you should move away from the action and rely on a tele-photo lens instead? I think about this all the time. I never just grab a lens. I try to think through the possibilities of why I should use this particular lens for this effect versus that lens for another effect.”

“I also have a bias for distinct color. I love color. It does not always make or break a photo, but color is very important to me all the same. There is no doubt that color can dictate a mood and feeling. It is real and cannot be ignored.”

“Finally, creativity in design and production is critical!”

What is your way of working on the set? Take the image of the basketball player, for instance. How do you create something like that?

“I will set up my tripod and frame up my shot, then close my eyes and picture exactly where the basketball player will be diving through the frame. I will then have the athlete stand in that spot to allow me to work my lights. Once the light is set, I place a quarter on the ground so the athlete knows exactly where he is to start and finish his jump.”

“The next thing I do is that I focus my camera on the player in the frame, switching my lens to manual focus to make sure that the lens does not change focus. This move really helps me get the tack sharp focus I demand from my shots, without giving myself a headache! Also, it saves the athlete from a hundred takes, preserving the athlete’s vigor for quality movements.”

“Once I’ve focused, I switch to manual exposure and close down a stop or two. This is one of the tricks I use to get richly saturated colors. If I were at even exposure, the sky might be a light blue as we would see it in normal conditions. But when closed down two stops, that light sky blue turns into an arresting deep true blue.”

“There is, however, one potential problem with this technique. Outdoors, and under exposing two full stops, your flash needs to somehow overpower the sun. That’s exactly the situation in which you guys help me. Profoto lights are powerful enough to properly expose my subject matter, while leaving all other aspects in my shot under exposed. Without these intensely powerful lights, I would be left with an unacceptably darkened photo.”

Filed Under: PressTagged With: composite, interview, profoto, Sports Photography

Profoto: In the Moment, Pt. II

The following interview originally appeared on the Profoto Blog. Be sure to catch up on Part One!

WRITTEN BY FREDRIK FRANZÉN ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7TH, 2012.

Yesterday, we published the first part of our interview with sports photographer Joe Morahan, in which he explained why he prefers set shots to live action images. He also shared his thoughts on what he believes are the most crucial factors for creating a striking sports image.

In this second part, Joe gives more detailed explanations of how he created the images that featured in this article.

Cave

“This is one of my most favorite shots. It is a composite of two images: one of the cave with the beam of light, and the other of a girl hanging from the cliff.”

“I went on a trip with some friends to the Slot Canyons, in Page, Arizona. The cave has very smooth walls that were created over hundreds of thousands of years of flash floods, where the rushing water sculpted all these beautiful structures. The sand at the base of these structures is very fine, like a baking-flour type consistency. It’s so soft that when you step on it there is a ‘popping’ sound and scattering of dust from around your shoe.”

“These canyons rise several hundred feet and at precise times, depending on the time of the year, the sunlight streaks across the Slot Canyons, producing laser like beams of light. These beams of light last for only a few moments each day and then disappear. The phenomenon leads to crowds of people waiting in the cave for the exact moment these spectacular rays of light appear. It’s quite a scene. The wonderful beams of light are both created and aided by tossing the fine dust from the canyon floor into the air. The sunlight refracts the dust in such a startling manner.”

“So after obtaining this shot in Slot Canyon, I decided it would be interesting to get a shot of a person hanging from the cliff walls. I hired a model and went to Red Rocks, Colorado, where there are an abundance of rocks on mountainous terrain that we could climb and stage something remarkable.”

“I set up my Profoto lighting with a standard Zoom Reflector. I closed my eyes to try and recall the original photo, with its lighting and the positioning of its rock walls. I then mimicked the lighting, which was direct daylight, and placed the rock–climber model in front of the beam of light, which required the light to be emanating from directly behind her. I quickly set the light while the model was hanging there – long enough for her to flex her lithe muscles, as if she’d endured quite a climb. I took the shot and she hopped off the rock. Finally, I merged the two images in Photoshop.”

Waterfall | ©Joe Morahan

Waterfall

“This one is also a composite image. This shot is quite simple with two components. One is the waterfall shot, the second a woman in a yoga pose. The waterfall was shot with available light at Mooney Falls, Near Havasu Falls, which is a 12-mile hike from the nearest town. Mooney Falls is down river from Havasu, but to reach the water, you first have to climb down a 150 foot cliff without ropes. With only some occasional rebar for hand and footholds, and the rocks slippery from mist, saving my life seem more important than trekking my Profoto gear, no matter how much I longed for it to be with me.”

“Once safely beneath the falls, I set up my camera and got my plate shot. When I returned to Denver, I placed my woman in a yoga position at a field near my house. I used two light sources: the sun and my Profoto light.”

“This particular image deviates from my normal style in that I used a softbox to soften up the lighting. This was necessary to match the original waterfall shot. I had taken the original waterfall shot first thing in the morning, before direct sunlight hit the waterfall. I had to make sure that the lighting patterns matched so that the image looked real to the viewer. I used a Softbox 4×6´ on a c-stand, and hung it over the woman’s head, so that one side would be slightly darker than the other side. You can see that in her arms, one is slightly darker than the other. This helped give a touch of direction to the lighting.”

Basketball player

“This may appear counter intuitive, but this shot has the least amount of compositing of all the images shown here. I brought a ladder on this shoot, setting up the camera directly under the rim, along the backboard. This way I was able to capture the exact frame! The basketball net and rim were old, rusty and broken, and it appeared exactly as you see it. The only Photoshoping tasks in this image were to give it the sepia tone, adding texture to the sky and cleaning up the court.”

“The original shot looked just like what you see here as far as the frame goes. I used only one light in this shot, other than the sun. From the rim’s point of view, the sun was to the left, and the Profoto flash was to its right. I used a Zoom Reflector in this image, keeping the lighting harsh, ‘contrasty’ and edgy. This photo shoot was a great example of why it’s so important for me to use Profoto lighting. This image was taken with a 17-40mm lens set at a focal length of 17mm. As you can see, a great deal of the court is visible, so I had to put my light relatively far away. As is my usual technique, I under exposed the background a stop or two at an exposure of f/13 at 1/250 of a second. That forced me to pump in a lot of light from a far distance – enough to make my subject pop. The Profoto lighting kit did the trick, as it always does.”

Fujifilm

Fujifilm ad promoting Velvia 100 in Photo District News (PDN) Magazine showing Start Trails by Joe Morahan

Rangefinder Magazine Profile

Rangefinder Magazine
Profile: Joe Morahan by Larry Brownstein

While the tree in this photo is only five feet high, the camera angle and lens choice make it look much larger.

Room service changed Joe Morahan’s life. No, he wasn’t vacationing at The Ritz, enjoying a luxury suite while waiting for a filet mignon dinner to be brought up to his room. Rather, he was working at a hotel in Littleton, Colorado, delivering room service meals to guests. One day he had an epiphany: He couldn’t go on like this forever. Before long, Morahan enrolled at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California—though he didn’t even know what an aperture was at that point. While his grade point average in high school had been an unremarkable 2.5, he graduated from Brooks magna cum laude in December 2005.

Morahan is currently very busy. Last week alone, he shot for four days. Since he feels he still has some catching up to do to approach the level of other working pros out there, his strategy includes shooting as much as he can. He uses models he finds through the Internet, in addition to shooting his two younger brothers and his friends. Morahan is so committed that he even uses himself as a model quite often!

Morahan self-portrait: “I can’t jump that high,” he says, “so I used a picnic bench just outside of the frame of the picture.”

One of my favorite images from his website—a dramatic shot of a basketball player leaping for a slam dunk—is one of the images where Morahan doubles as both model and photographer (see image on next page). He managed to capture himself with a dramatic backwards arch in his back, the ball poised high in the air, ready to be smashed down through the rim just beyond. I wondered how he did this all by himself, especially since doesn’t look tall enough to dunk.

Morahan explains that he positioned a four-foot high picnic table near the hoop. A Canon EOS-1D Mark II with a 15mm fisheye was positioned nearby, which he set to burst mode with a shutter speed of 1/8000 to freeze the motion. Morahan jumped off the picnic table 45 times, until his ankle hurt and he worried that he had broken it.

“This shot was taken is Solvang, CA,” says Morahan. “The exposure was f/8, and it was taken over a period of two hours. The ISO was 100, film was Fujifilm Provia 100.”

His dedication doesn’t stop there, though. He told me about a soccer shoot in which he wanted to capture the perfect bicycle kick; again, Morahan used himself as the model. Knowing that he would be landing on his back repeatedly, he chose a location with sand, hoping it would be better protection than a grass field. When the weather was right, he went out and set up the camera focus and composition, positioning a friend behind the camera to trigger the shutter to fire the camera at nine frames per second. A few dozen kicks and several hundred exposures later, he was finished with the shoot, having captured the perfect moment. Unfortunately, his shoulder was sore for two weeks after that shoot.

One of his Brooks professors, Chuck Place, gets credit for this relentless pursuit of the great shot. Morahan recalls receiving a positive critique for an assignment he had done, only to have Place talk to him privately and encourage him to reshoot, believing his student could do better. Morahan did as instructed, taking his time to find a better approach. The real lesson for Morahan was that taking time to plan a shoot pays off in the long run. “He told me that the only way to fail on a photo shoot was by not getting exactly what you want,” Morahan says. “It proved to be one of the most important lessons I ever learned as a photographer.”

“A shot of my brother’s soccer team, in Lehigh, PA.”

Morahan learned another fundamental from Brooks professor Ralph Clevenger. “He showed me the most incredible shot of a flower that I’d ever seen in my life,” Morahan recalls. “He told me that you don’t have to search for the perfect flower—that it is all in the composition and how you light it.” Still, Morahan expressed his doubts; his suspicion was that the shot was taken in an exotic location. “When he showed me the wide angle shot and I saw that there were just two flowers at the side of a gas station parking lot, it really changed my view. You don’t have to go to some crazy location; beauty is everywhere.”

One of Morahan’s favorite subjects is surfing, and he approaches it with characteristic zeal. He told me about going out with his friend early in the morning. Usually, he shoots with a 300mm lens and a 2X teleconverter on a Canon EOS-1D Mark II—which is equivalent to a 780mm lens. He’ll shoot hundreds of frames while the light is good, then spend the middle part of the day editing. Later in the day, when the light is good again, he’ll return and shoot more.

Daniel Jacobs shoot for Santa Barbara Fitness Magazine.

There was one image in his portfolio that was of particular interest to me because of the use of water blur around Morahan’s surfer subject. It turns out that he shot this one at 1/20 of a second while panning with the 780mm lens!

Morahan loves saturated color. One way he likes to attain it is by underexposing the background. The image of Morahan dunking the basketball with the orange background is a good example of this, as the background is about two stops underexposed.

Photographed at 780mm at 1/20 at f/22 to blur the action.

While sports action photography is his main focus, Morahan is also quite adept at sports portraiture—“sportraiture,” as he calls it on his website. His site contains a portfolio of beautifully lit portraits of surfers, soccer players, golfers, tennis players and other athletes.

Another love of this diverse photographer’s is travel and nature photography. He has made several trips to Africa and hopes that this body of work will culminate in a book. He likes to experiment with long exposure images that capture the movement of the sky. For instance, exposures lasting one to eight hours are effectively able to show the circular trail of the stars against the backdrop of night.

Getting the star trail image of the windmills outside of Palm Springs, California, (see image above) was particularly challenging. He recounts that, as he set up the shot and felt himself battered by a mighty gust of wind, it became clear why the windmills were placed at that specific spot in the desert near the San Jacinto Mountains. Morahan was afraid the wind would ruin the shot, especially because it was a long exposure, but since he was already there, he figured it was worth a try. He braced the tripod with rocks around each of the legs and pulled it off without any blur.

“This shot was taken on my way to Arizona, from California. I saw some windmills and pulled my car over and shot for a few hours. The exposure was f/5.6; the film was Fujichrome Velvia.”

Morahan is busy accumulating tear sheets. His photos are published regularly in Santa Barbara Fitness Magazine, including a recent cover. He is represented by New Sport Photo and he also shoots stock.

In addition, Brooks is running an ad featuring a Morahan photo. It’s a beautiful shot of a surfer going airborne with water splashing all around. The shot is backlit by the setting sun, which makes the spray look like shattered glass. The surfer seems to be breaking free from the ocean. The copy reads: “Focus. Commitment. Excellence”— what an apt description of Morahan himself. Visit www.joemorahan.com.

Larry Brownstein is the photographer and author of two books, Los Angeles, Where Anything is Possible and The Midnight Mission. His photos appear in numerous books, magazines, calendars, etc. His stock photography is represented by Getty Images. He has a growing wedding photography business. His work can be seen at www.larrybrownstein.com.

May 2007

Nickelodeon: The Last Airbender

This all was shot for Nickelodeon for their TV campaign for The Last Airbender.  I shot along side Otherfilms and it was a crazy few days to say the least.  Lots of fun sets, fun people, and great imagery

Photography Composites; Rangfinder Magazine, Cookbook

Everything changes when I step on the soccer field. For 90 minutes the world is reduced to a very small pitch of turf where 22 athletes compete. The exhaustion at game’s end is exquisite. Capturing such elusive feelings would prove a very difficult assignment. I’ve shot soccer many times before, but no shot I had taken adequately captured the emotional depth that I was looking for. So, after much trial and effort (and failure), I concluded I needed a composite shot, since nothing else was working.

INGREDIENTS
• Camera: Canon 1D Mark II and Canon Elan
• Lens: Canon 80–200mm f/2.8
• Flash Card: Lexar 4GB
• Film: Fujichrome Provia 100
• Flash: Canon 550EZ
• Computer: Macintosh G5
• Software: Photoshop CS2
• Scanner: Nikon Scan 5000

By constructing a composite, I would be able create the scene I had in my mind’s eye and would have complete control of every element of the photograph.

I headed off to the beach—to shoot myself! I set up the camera and went to work. I would jump in the air and do bicycle kicks over and over. I would check my shot. Not quite right. The angle was wrong. My arm was out of place. The ball was too high. After 30 takes, I could not lift my right arm.

The next step was to shoot a beautiful tract of grass, simulating the thick, full pitch of a soccer field. I made sure to shoot the grass under the same lighting conditions. I then went to a local park and shot a hill so that the grass would carry over onto the horizon line. I now had the first two elements of the composite shot in place; I would have to wait for just the perfect sunset.

I would wait nearly a month for the conditions I needed. I wanted a cloud formation that was somewhat triangular in nature that would add depth to the composition in the final image. Finally, that day arrived and the clouds appeared about right. I gathered my gear and went to get the shot of the sky.

The final element of the picture is a shot of a friend of mine looking down from the clouds. I shot this beautiful picture of her and placed her within the thick, turbulent clouds—a graceful presence, overlooking from above.

Now that I had all five images shot, it was time to put all the elements together in Photoshop. This proved far more challenging than I had originally anticipated. I first arranged each image on its own layer, displaying it as large as possible for precise work. I used the Pen Tool to select and cut out individual elements and used a Quick Mask to isolate the grass. Next, I blended the different elements together. I applied a Gaussian Blur filter to the grass to help give the photograph depth, which also helped blend the sky and the grass together. I took time to make fine adjustments—to position the soccer ball relative to my body position, to blur the edge of the grass just so, to blend the sky at the horizon line just a tad more. In time the image took form. Because all shots were made in the similar lighting conditions, the pieces came together nicely. It is really kind of a cut and paste composite photograph.

Rangefinder Magazine
January 2006

Rf Cookbook by Joe Morahan
Composites

View Article On Rangefinder Website

Red Bull Illume

Wanna see whats in the bag?

VIDEO: Jeep Prank

VIDEO: Jeep Prank

Reenacting a  Jeep Prank — talk about a fun shoot, right? In fact, it could be the most fun I have ever had on a motion project. One of the main goals of this project was to have authentic footage and in order to have that authentic feel, we needed to set down the cinematic glass, and pick up some cell phones and GoPro’s. As a professional its always hard replacing my pro equipment with amateur gear, but it was the right move and made the film more dynamic.

It all started the year 1999, with a prank that originated from my “wilder” times. With cooperation from a couple of my friends, I decided to pack my buddy’s Jeep — door to door — with fall leaves. We died in laughter as we watched him try to enter his car in a suit and tie on his way to a job interview. I thought recreating this moment would be a lot of fun and give me a great excuse to hang with some friends on set.

Just to gather all the leaves was a challenge. I think I racked about 4 to 5 carloads of leaves. The more you shove in there, the more they flatten down, so we needed a ton of leaves. Being careful to get undamaged leaves was a must and after a few car trips, and a lot of bags, my garage was filled to the brim with leaves.

Seeing as, I was going to be shooting this project on pro cameras, cell phone cameras, and GoPro’s I had to call my DP and camera wizard, Buddy Thomas. I needed an extra eye that understood the cameras, their capabilities, and how to use them to our advantage. Since I knew that I would be busy with shooting and directing, I put Buddy in charge of the pranksters’ phones and GoPro’s. Buddy gloriously managed four different types of recording devices. We ended with a nice mix of pro shots, shaky cell phone videos and unique GoPro footage.

The storytelling for the prank was directed, just as it would have happened. We placed more focus on hitting all the shots and angles during filming. It’s too hard to go back once you have dumped a few hundred pounds of leaves in a car, so we were meticulous as we moved along.

In the end, the silly Internet prank video was a joy to film. The final cut is all too reminiscent of the old days and makes for a good laugh with friends. Enjoy the film and don’t get any ideas…

2nd Place- Alumni Association of Brooks Institute of Photography

I was pretty stoked to find out that one of my sports images took 2nd place in the first AABI Visual Arts Contest titled “Nature vs. Man.”

2nd Place- Alumni Association of Brooks Institute of Photography

Joe Morahan takes 2nd place in the first AABI Visual Arts Contest titled “Nature vs. Man.”

Star Trails Illuminate the Night

Star Trails Illuminate the Night

The ability to bring the night to life with photographic magic is a cathartic experience. To the naked, untrained eye, night might seem to be a dark, boring stillness—but this is to miss out on the beauty and motion one can see only at night. From a photographic standpoint, shooting at night is quite difficult because of all the variables. But the results can be exquisite.

My vision was simple—a photograph of a huge, triumphant tree, framed by star trails as they moved through the night sky. Making my vision a reality proved far more complex. Many issues confronted me and thwarted an easy setup.

Finding the right tree on the right hill with the right slope took hours of hunting. At one point, I was about to conclude that no such site existed anywhere near where I was searching. Then, like magic, the perfect specimen appeared right in front of me near Solvang, California.

The next step was more technical, calculating just how I could get the exact exposure I wanted. I would need a moonless night to avoid ambient lighting. Years of nighttime shooting have given me the experience to determine in which direction the stars will rotate by using Polaris (the North Star) as my anchor point. I used this insight to my advantage to support the composition.

From previous photographic shoots, I knew that a good base exposure would be two hours at f/8 with ISO 400 film. Shooting such long exposures requires film, as digital efforts produce digital noise that would ruin the exposure.

It was a tricky setup, and a sturdy tripod was an absolute must— the slightest vibration or movement over two hours will ruin the desired effect. Proper framing of a shot at night is quite difficult, so I brought a flashlight and spent an hour or so framing what I believed would be the perfect setup. I set the focus at infinity and used a cable release to keep the shutter open for the two hours.

I had to wait nearly a month to get the moonless midnight I needed. I set up early and waited for the dark blue sky to fade into black. In the deep darkness I started the exposure, making sure the North Star was framed properly. Then I just waited and prayed all would turn out according to plan.

The next morning produced bad news. I studied the developed film and saw that the star trails through the skies were broken up with huge gaps between them. The gaps were caused by clouds that had passed high in the night sky.

INGREDIENTS
• Camera: Canon Elan
• Lens: EF 17–40mm f/4L USM
• Film: Fujichrome ISO 400
• Scanner: Nikon Scan 5000
• Computer: Power Mac G5
• Software: Photoshop CS2
• Other: Cable release, flash light, tripod

I had no option but to reshoot. I would never have imagined it would take four more attempts to get it right!

Weather predictions on the night of the last shoot called for a clear, cloudless night. This was lucky, as I found out the hard way that Solvang gets a lot of fog. I drove back to what I now affectionately called “my tree” and started the familiar routine.

I had been shooting approximately two hours when I noticed the fog rolling in over Solvang, creating an orange glow over the city. I made a conscious decision to continue the exposure for another 30 minutes, allowing ample time for the film to absorb the orange tint. When I studied the film the next morning I was amazed. It was a perfectly clean exposure and the sky looked incredible. It is in moments such as this that a photographer knows all that work is worth it!

Visit www.joemorahan.com.

Rangefinder Magazine
July 2006

Rf Cookbook: by Joe Morahan
Star Trails Illuminate the Night

View Article on Rangefinder