Portraits at Twilight

On Tuesday I had a chance to take a few photos for the OSU baseball team which was really exciting for me because I have been looking for reasons to take more portraits to build up that part of my portfolio. Like usual I had a ton of ideas but between talking to the SID about what he was looking for and the difficulty of some of my ideas, something simple seemed to be the best direction to go with the shoot. 

The set-up was easy enough with a set of RadioPoppers, two Canon 430ex Speedlites, and a softbox. With the shoot starting after the team's practice there was only a little light left in the sky so I set the white balance to 3500K which would give the background a nice blue hue and used warming gels to light the players.

Something I have learned from assisting different photographers who have radically different shooting techniques is that your subjects don't like waiting around. Keeping this in mind I made sure to have everything ready to go as soon as they were ready and everything worked perfectly. In total the players spent maybe four minutes in front of the lens, Success! The rest of the hour I spent there was waiting for practice to end and player meeting. All in all I am very happy with how everything went.