Paige Hassen: JRN

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My experience:

This second sports portrait was probably the hardest assignment in terms of contacting someone to get a photo. With the fashion and location photos, everyone was eager to help and wanted to be part of a photoshoot (or to even get free photos of themselves). I had multiple people bail on me for this assignment, so I was happy to finally have found a person to cover.

For this shoot, I really wanted to focus on being unique. I looked through Pinterest to find some ideas, but ultimately, I loved the idea of heavy contrast that only lights up a few things in the photo that I wanted to cover. For example, the very dark layup in the 4th photo… his number, the basket, and the ball is lit up through lighting.

Dramatic lighting may be the better term for this. It’s a style of photography I have came to love.

As for the outside shoot, this was hard to cover. It got postponed multiple times due to rain or wind, but that’s just the spring weather I had to work around. I wanted the outside shoot to be more artsy-casual, which is why you can see him wearing a hat and necklaces to express himself a little more outside of the court.

I was really hoping for a partly cloudy, blue sky day, but it was all clouds that created a plain white background. It worked out well, especially when transitioning to black and white. That’s another thing I have learned throughout the duration of this course and my career as a student photojournalist; to be adaptive and able to move on your toes to be ready for anything and make the most out of what you have.

This shoot was a lot of fun. I liked it a little more than the gymnastics one, only because there was less stress. During the gymnastics one, there were people watching and I felt this sense of pressure to hurry and not mess up. Granted, that was my first shoot of the entire 8 of the final, so I’ve had a lot of growth already since.

For this shoot, the pressure was almost non-existent. It was a chill photoshoot that was just fun. The little pressure I felt came from Anthony being a prominent CMU athlete, so the photos I would take, I wanted/felt like they needed to be just as good as something I would see on the athletics website. Other than that, it went really well.